Editorial


Introduction

This issue marks the start of the twenty-fifth year of publication of Information Research: as founder and Editor, perhaps I ought not to say this, but I believe this to be a remarkable achievement. Not simply because the journal has survived this length of time, but that it has survived as a truly open access journal, with no article processing charges and no subscription. That this has been achieved is due largely to the team of voluntary workers who act as Regional Editors, seeing submissions through the review process, and Copy-editors, ensuring that the papers are readable and intelligible, as well as observing the journal's author instructions. Without their collaboration, the journal would have died long ago, and I cannot express sufficiently my thanks to them for supporting the journal so selflessly. Almost is surprising is the fact that we have published on the 15th of each quarter month, without fail - we have never needed to delay publication or combine issues, and the fact that last year there were more than half a million hits on the Website, suggests that we are filling a need.

It is also clear that others think that we are filling a need, as I recently received an offer from a publisher to buy the journal for $80,000. I had to explain that I no longer own the journal and that the University of Borås was investing significantly in its future (along with other journals published by the University). Perhaps if the offer had been made a couple of years ago, I might have been tempted :-)

From this issue we use the APA Publications Manual, 7th edition, which brings about specific changes. The most obvious of these, as readers will see from the papers, are:

  • "et al." is now used for all works with three or more authors, including from the first citation - previously, all authors were required for the first citation
  • the place of publication is no longer required for reference list items
  • surnames and initials of up to twenty authors are now required (instead of the previous seven names)
  • "Retrieved from..." is no longer required before the URL of the Web-located item
  • DOIs in the form "https://doi.org/..." are now required for all items that possess DOIs

The APA rules are more closely adhered to than previously, but there are still some exceptions, which are shown in the Author Instructions.

Items in the reference list reflect these changes:

  • if a DOI leads only to the publisher's page describing the item, but not to the paper itself, the DOI is shown as a link;
  • if a DOI leads to the specific paper, or to a page with a link to an openly available paper, the DOI is used as a link in the title of the item;
  • if, in addition to a DOI (or if there is no DOI), there is a URL leading to an openly available copy of the paper, the item at the URL is archived to the Internet Archive, and the Archive's URL is then used as the link in the title of the item;
  • if the DOI leads directly to an openly available copy, there is no need to archive the item, as my understanding is that DOIs in their new form are a more effective means of preserving the location of the item.

There are items in the reference lists of the papers in this issue that show these rules in operation.

In this issue

We have nine papers in this issue, with the usual international distribution of authors: they come from Australia, Belgium, Brazil, China, Croatia, Malaysia, Saudi Arabia, the UK, and the USA. The fact that there are nine countries and nine papers is something of a coincidence, as only two papers have a single author and some of the rest involve international collaboration.

The subject range is equally diverse: Wei and Zhang explore emerging trends in business journals using co-citation analysis; Wang investigates the adoption of open government data by innovators and entrepreneurs; and Albassam and Ruthven report on an investigation into users' relevance criteria when selection videos for leisure purposes.

We also have a couple of papers related to social media use: Talip and Narayan, investigate the phenomenon of co-experience through a study of information technology professionals' use of Twitter; and Abdoh investigates the use of social networks for medication information by Middle Eastern students studying in the USA.

Abdoh's paper could also be classified in the larger group of papers relating to health information. Two of these, by Huisman and colleages, and by Jorge and Albagli, relate to information sharing: one in the case of adults in Belgium aged fifty or older, and the other the case of research data sharing during the Zika virus emergency in Brazil. Kim and colleagues explore the personal management of health information by college students, and Katavic and colleagues report on an investigation into Croatian college students' information needs regarding sexual health and worries about sexual health outcomes.

In all, this is a diverse set of papers which illustrates the interest in information research around the world.

Book reviews

We have five book reviews in this issue. I was responsible for only one of these, The hacker and the state, by Ben Buchanan, which I found thoroughly enthralling. I can recommend it to anyone interested in cyber-warfare and the current state of the art in that area. It is also essential reading for anyone who believes that the villains are only to be found in the East - there are black hats in the West, too. Otherwise, Helen Taylor's Why women read and Daniel Russell's The joy of search, book look extremely interesting. I've had a quick skim through Russell's book and found it absolutely fascinating, and I'm looking forward to getting my hands on Taylor's book.

Lastly

I have already said, in the first paragraph, what the journal owes to its voluntary supporters, but I must also add here that the work of our reviewers is also highly appreciated. We are well aware that current workloads and information demands from university administrations are bordering on the oppressive (if they have not already gone beyond that point), and reviewing a paper is not a trivial task, so our thanks to all of those who have taken the time to respond to our requests.


Professor Tom Wilson
Editor-in-Chief
March, 2020