Editorial


Introduction

I was very sorry to hear of the death of Dr. Judit Bar-Ilan, who was a strong supporter of the journal, having published at least half-a-dozen papers in the journal and having encouraged others to submit papers. She also reviewed papers for us from time to time and her reviews were always thorough and helpful to the authors. It is fitting that her final paper is published in this issue, co-authored by her colleagues Tali Gazit and Yair Amichai-Hamburger, who dedicate the paper to her memory.

In this issue

We have eleven papers in this issue covering a diverse range of topics: unusually, as a result of the vagaries of the reviewing process, the first two are by Reijo Savolainen (another staunch supporter of this journal), both deal with aspects of online discussion groups, and the social media theme is continued by Feng Yang and colleagues, who investigate user satisfaction with the Chinese government's social media platforms, and by Judit Bar-Ilan and colleagues on engagement in closed Facebook groups.

The remaining papers are very diverse: the use of news and patent mining to identify growth companies (Lin and colleagues); intellectual property search systems (Dang et al.); information seeking by Chinese ethnic minorities (Zhu and Liao); the non-sharing of information (Huisman and colleagues); a comparison of subject guides and resource discovery tools (Tyson and Dinneen); personal digital archives (Drosopoulou and Cox); and, finally, a follow-up to my ISIC paper on the transfer of theories and models from information behaviour into other disciplines.

Book reviews

As usual, the book reviews in this issue range over a wide variety of topics, from archives and the history of the book, to international and comparative librarianship and dyslexia. Something for (almost) everyone!

Lastly

My usual thanks to our Regional Editors, copy-editors, and reviewers who do such an excellent job in maintaining the standard of the journal. I don't really care about the league tables of supposed journal 'quality' because I know that everyone involved in the production of the journal is committed to producing issues that demonstrate quality every quarter. Their commitment is a much better indicator of quality than any citation count could ever be.


Professor Tom Wilson
Editor-in-Chief
September, 2020