Editorial

Information Research continues to develop. The journal is now published in association with three other Departments of Information Studies and related disciplines: the Department of Information Studies at the University of Tampere, Finland, where Dr. Reijo Savolainen is Regional Editor for the Nordic countries; the Faculty of Communication at the University of Vilnius, with Dr. Elena Maceviciute as Regional Editor for Central and Eastern Europe; and the School of Library and Information Sciences at the University of North Texas, where Dr. Amanda Spink will act as the Regional Editor for North America. The new Regional Editors will be eager to hear from colleagues wishing to submit papers for refereeing, or as Working Papers, which are unrefereed. The three Regional Editors, together with the Editor and others, will act as the Board of Referees for the journal. In this issue we have another new feature - the papers submitted to the Doctoral Workshop which was held as part of the second international conference on Information Seeking in Context at Sheffield in August. The papers were not intended to be fully finished scholarly products, but simply to provide the basis for small group seminars during the Workshop - they are, therefore, "Working Papers" in a very real sense.

In this issue we have our usual mix of refereed and unrefereed papers: Carol Marlow and Hugh Preston of the University of Wales, Aberystwyth, present a refereed paper on the role of Healthcare Resource Groups in the UK National Health Service in allocating resources for the treatment of chronic diseases, specifically, in this instance, cancer. This paper looks at an information management issue of major relevance to a very large organization (the biggest single employer in the UK), using patient record data as the basis for decision making.

Next Amanda Spink and Judy Bateman of the University of North Texas, together with Major Bernard Janson of the US Military Academy report on a study of the users of the EXCITE search engine on the World Wide Web - 357 people responded to an on-line questionnaire that was made available at the EXCITE Web-site and the analysis reveals that they employed very simple search strategies and carried out successive searches on the same topic.

Finally, we have a Working Paper from Kathryn Ray and Joan Day on Student attitudes towards electronic information resources, based on work carried out as part of the IMPEL project at the University of Northumbria at Newcastle, UK.

You will see that our contents page is now divided into Refereed Papers and Working Papers - contributors may opt to publish in either section.

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Information Research is designed, maintained and published by by Professor Tom Wilson. Design and editorial content © T.D. Wilson, 1995-98