Guest editorial

This special issue of Aslib Journal of Information Management showcases doctoral research in the information science community. It was initiated by the European Chapter (EC) of the Association for Information Science and Technology (ASIS&T). The chapter was established in 1993 and is the leading European community of academics and practitioners in the field of information science and a part of the worldwide ASIS&T community (www.asist.org). The present set of articles is an outcome of a call for article proposals written by doctoral students and candidates together with their supervisors. The aim was to offer a possibility of exchanging ideas, discussing good practices and showcasing current research conducted by early-career researchers in the field of information science and technology, and related fields. The scope of this special issue was consciously broad to acknowledge the diversity of information science-related investigations and to open up the special issue to include work from around the field.

As a result of this call, this special issue presents a selection of new information science research across the broad discipline highlighting both novel and established topics of inquiry. It provides a vista to the research interests of early stage researchers and at the same time, probably a small glimpse to the future of the information field. Overall, this special issue received 28 submissions from authors all over the world, of which close to half passed successfully the review process.

Collaborating and writing research papers together with colleagues is a fundamental experience and skill young research professionals can benefit from. There is hardly anything more natural than to start practicing it together with one's doctoral supervisor. For doctoral students, writing papers together with their supervisors is an excellent opportunity for getting a large dose of tutoring, and for learning to conduct and report research in practice. For supervisors, it provides a similarly great opportunity to engage in hands-on mentoring, and to collaborate rather than to teach. For both, as we firmly believe, it provides an occasion to learn a lot from each other.

Sponsoring the present special issue aligns well with the aims of the EC of ASIS&T. The chapter works to promote cooperation between students (including bachelor, master and doctoral students) and senior scholars not only within Europe but also all over the world. Collaborations between younger and more experienced researchers strengthen the field by highlighting continuity and growth of the key lines of research in the field and by helping new fresh ideas to break through.

As a whole, this special issue provides an interesting peek into current information science research. As frequently noted, information science unfolds also here as an interdisciplinary field of research that spans across contexts and includes topics ranging, for example, from social media to scholarly communication, archiving and digital preservation. This special issue highlights the methodological variety of information science research that covers qualitative, quantitative and mixed-methods designs. The authors have turned to a large number of different methods from conducting interviews and screening websites to network analysis, surveys, card-sorting exercises, reviews and web-based experiments to inquire into their research topics. The studies that are showcased here illustrate similarly how researchers adopt ideas and theories from neighboring fields to address information science specific research problems and perspectives. At the same time, the selection of articles shows that information science has a lot to contribute to discussions across a broad range of topics, and that an information perspective makes a difference.

This special issue starts with a contribution by Gal Yavetz and Noa Aharony investigating the social media strategies by the Israeli government organization and agencies. Based on semi-structured in-depth interviews, the authors investigated the strategies of how the employees of various Israeli government offices are managing and disseminating information by using social media platforms. The case study showed that Facebook was favored as social network platform for communication with citizens and to raise public awareness. The results also showed that social media platforms are chosen based on their ability to share different kinds of visual content.

The second article of the special issue investigated how online reviews affect purchase intention. The study is based on stimulus-organism-response framework and concludes that both perceived information quality and social presence of online reviews positively affect trust and satisfaction. Further, according to the analysis satisfaction toward online reviews affects purchase intention. The study found in addition that the perceived quality of positive online reviews impacts trust, satisfaction and purchase intention. The following article “The assessment of the appraisal of records: case of the University of Witwatersrand and the University of Venda” inquires into appraisal practices at South African universities. The authors note that there is a need for developing appraisal strategies and capacity building. Moreover, instead of directly adopting frameworks developed in other countries, there is a need for developing appraisal policies and procedures that take into account the local South African culture, norms and values.

Besides investigating the use of social media in the organizational environment, information science is also concerned with the use of mobile mental health applications. Alyson Gamble investigated the emerging subject of artificial intelligence (AI) and mobile applications for mental healthcare from a social informatics perspective. Interestingly, as chatbots encounter everyday life more and more, they are also playing a crucial role in mobile mental healthcare applications. By conducting a scoping literature review and investigating the current mobile mental healthcare applications on the market, the author points outs that even if chatbots and AI are useful, they could not and should not replace a therapist or other mental health clinician generally. Apart from social informatics-related aspects, author also points out that chatbots and mobile mental healthcare applications need to accomplish clinical standards.

Eun Youp Rha and Nicholas Belkin introduce in their text cognitive sociology as a theoretical framework to investigate social aspects of task perception. Apart from demonstrating the applicability of the theory in the context of information science research, the study demonstrates that the same task types are perceived differently in different social contexts.

The article “Optimisation of Archival Processes involving Digitisation of Typewritten Documents” compares optical character recognition of typewritten texts using two software packages, Tesseract and Abbyy FineReader. The latter achieved better accuracy but both packages were noted to have advantages. Further, higher digitization accuracy was not found to be linearly linked to higher accuracy of character recognition. Similarly, prebinarization of images did not appear to improve the results.

Sarah Nikkhah and colleagues investigate how Iranians use the messaging application Telegram for seeking immigration-related information. The study shows the central role of Telegram for Iranian immigrants and the variety of information practices its users engage with when discussing immigration-related issues.

The use of scientific databases and search engines for scientific literature is part of the everyday use of scientists and students. Johnson and Faiz Abdullah A Alotaibi conducted an online survey (200 postgraduate students in the UK) and investigated reasons to adopt or reject the search engine Google Scholar to search scientific literature in a university context. This investigation showed that the ease of use is not the only factor influencing the perception and intention to use Google Scholar.

Maria Grant and coauthors ask in their article “what we can learn from elite academic staff publication portfolios”. They approach the question by a longitudinal social network analysis to investigate how researchers' coauthorship networks evolve during their careers, and how and when the investments in developing these networks realize in publication impact.

The article “Investigating academic library responses to predatory publishing in the United States, Canada, and Spanish-speaking Latin America” by Jairo Buitrago Ciro and Lynne Bowker investigates how academic libraries in Canada and the US, and the Spanish-speaking Latin America respond to predatory publishing, respectively. Based on an analysis of library websites, most of the Canadian and US libraries either employ a scholarly communications librarians or offer workshops on predatory publishing. In contrast, predatory publishing is never mentioned explicitly on the websites of the academic libraries in the Spanish-speaking Latin America.

The article “Constructing information experience: A grounded theory portrait of academic information management” by Lettie Conrad, Christine S. Bruce and Virginia M. Tucker focuses on student-researchers and how they are managing academic information as means of a case study. In discussing theoretical and methodological contributions of constructivist information experience research facets of information management are further studied. As a first result, the authors worked out the following three interpretative categories: (1) what they perceive as information; (2) how they determine what information requires their individual management and (3) what strategies they develop for achieving those management practices. They cover how the student-researchers relate to academic information management and what they experienced.

Hocker, Schindler and Rittberger present their work and preliminary results of creating an ontology in the field of open science for qualitative coding schemas. Thereby, the ontology creation is based on a participatory design approach. As determined by the authors, and as a first result, participatory ontology design can positively influence the creation process or outcome regarding the following five aspects: (1) acceptance of new ideas for the ontology, (2) commitment, (3) a capacity building for the researchers, (4) the creation of broader common ground and (5) the quality and the depth of the developed ontology. The authors will continue their research with a second evaluation phase.

Priya Kizhakkethil's article discusses conceptual aspects of investigating virtual diasporic communities from the perspectives of document experience and memory-making. The author draws on her ongoing empirical work on fan-fiction relating to a popular TV-show written by Indian women living in diaspora. The study points to multiple potentially useful links between a large number of earlier concepts that can help in framing the understanding of diasporic virtual communities, their role in collective and individual memory-making and the experiences of their participants.

Overall the articles in this special issue provide an interesting panorama to contemporary information science research. The studies provide insights both in emerging trends and new topics within the information science community. They do also highlight the benefits of keeping an open mind and considering diverse research methods. Last but not least they show how research lives out of exchange, constructive feedback and collaborations. As noted already in the beginning of this editorial, apart from showcasing these particular already finalized studies, we as editors hope that this collection of articles motivate readers to follow the lead of the authors in this special issue to reach out to the colleagues and start new collaborations and continue ongoing fruitful discussions between different generations of information science researchers to benefit of bringing together experiences of both early career and more experienced scholars.

Finally, we would like to thank all authors, both doctoral students and supervisors for their impressive work, and all reviewers for their voluntary support and constructive feedback throughout the review process, as well as professor Dirk Lewandowski, the editor of Aslib Journal of Information Management, for the opportunity to publish the issue in this journal.