(4 Feb 2021) From Aaron Tay’s Musings about librarianship: “It seems to me when posting academic papers on social media for promotional purposes, there are 3 factors at play. What content you post / how you post the message When and how often you post the message Who you can reach – aka the reach/number…
(4 Feb 2021) The most noteworthy reference titles published in 2020 have been named to the 2021 Outstanding References Sources List, an annual list selected by experts of the Collection Development and Evaluation Section (CODES) of the Reference and User Services Association (RUSA), a division of ALA. The list was announced Thursday at the Book &…
(2 Feb 2021) Kudos, the award-winning service for accelerating and broadening research impact, has today launched a new service for scholarly publishers and publishing societies. The Kudos Showcase for Publishers provides a beautiful new discovery channel for published content, helping publishers and societies strengthen their support for authors in the increasingly key area of broader audiences…
(21 Jan 2021) Abstract of the preprint: “The purpose of this article is to explore options to further open access in the Netherlands from 2021. Its premise is that there is a need to look at qualitative aspects of open access, alongside quantitative ones. The paper first takes stock of progress that has been made.…
The pandemic prompted many scientists to pivot their research to the coronavirus. That’s not an entirely good thing. By Julie K. Pfeiffer and Terence S. Dermody (29 Jan 2021, feed from Knowable Magazine) For many researchers, the choice to spend decades working in a lab or in the field comes from a desire to…
(1 Jan 2021) The Leisure and Cultural Service Department (LCSD), Hong Kong launches its Edutainment Channel, a new one-stop online platform covering informative and learning materials on aspects of culture and leisure. The Edutainment Channel, combing education with entertainment, is best captured by its slogan “One click to treasures – Culture & Leisure” With…
(27 Jan 2021) A children’s library on a boat was launched in Kolkata on Republic Day, a first-of-a-kind initiative. Children will be able to choose from a selection of 500 titles in English and Bengali on the Young Readers’ Boat Library, an official said on Tuesday. The idea behind the boat library is that one…
(29 Jan 2021) Retraction of academic journal articles generally means major flaws are found in the research, which cannot be amended by simple correction. There might be many reasons why the articles are retracted. In this issue on Fun Facts on Numbers, let’s take a look at how many articles were retracted due to image-related…
(23 Jan 2021) From the abstract: “To provide some context for the potential engagement behavior of Twitter users around science, this article investigates how Bitly short links to scientific publications embedded in scholarly Twitter mentions are clicked on Twitter. Based on the click metrics of over 1.1 million Bitly short links referring to Web of…
(22 Jan 2021) The uses of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) are topics of presentations at most conferences today across diverse professional disciplines. Why? The following quote says it all: “Just as electricity transformed almost everything 100 years ago, today I actually have a hard time thinking of an industry that I don’t…