Smart electric meters collect data on electricity use to potentially improve efficiency for utilities, shape power consumption, and ultimately reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Consumer groups and experts have raised concerns about privacy, as smart meters can provide detailed information about activity within the home. This study examines privacy beliefs of U.S. consumers using qualitative data from

This article explores technological sovereignty as a way to respond to anxieties of control in digital urban contexts, and argues that this may promise a more meaningful social license to operate smart cities. First, we present an overview of smart city developments with a critical focus on corporatization and platform urbanism. We critique Alphabet's Sidewalk Labs development in Toronto, which faces

Though there is a tension between citizens' privacy concerns and their acceptance of government surveillance, there is little systematic research in this space and less still in a cross‐cultural context. We address the research gap by modeling the factors that drive public acceptance of government surveillance, and by exploring the influence of national culture. The research involved an online survey

Conventional rule‐based approaches use exact template matching to capture linguistic information and necessarily need to enumerate all variations. We propose a novel flexible template generation and matching scheme called the principle‐based approach (PBA) based on sequence alignment, and employ it for reference metadata extraction (RME) to demonstrate its effectiveness. The main contributions of this

A common intermediate language representation in neural machine translation can be used to extend bilingual systems by incremental training. We propose a new architecture based on introducing an interlingual loss as an additional training objective. By adding and forcing this interlingual loss, we can train multiple encoders and decoders for each language, sharing among them a common intermediate representation

When developing university‐based research data curation services, libraries face critical decisions around organization and sustainability that can affect dataset producers' satisfaction with these services. We present a study, involving interviews (n = 43) and ethnographic observation, of how two libraries partnered with the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) to curate a significant astronomy dataset

In recent years, cross‐modal retrieval has been a popular research topic in both fields of computer vision and natural language processing. There is a huge semantic gap between different modalities on account of heterogeneous properties. How to establish the correlation among different modality data faces enormous challenges. In this work, we propose a novel end‐to‐end framework named Dual Multi‐Angle

Although the Internet allows people to circulate messages using different media, most censorship studies discuss the removal of text content. This article presents a systematic study regarding the censorship of both plain text and multimedia content on the Chinese Internet. By analyzing both censored and surviving posts on the Chinese social media platform Weibo during the 2014 Hong Kong Umbrella Movement

The use of intelligent machines—digital technologies that feature data‐driven forms of customization, learning, and autonomous action—is rapidly growing and will continue to impact many industries and domains. This is consequential for communities of researchers, educators, and practitioners concerned with studying, supporting, and educating information professionals. In the face of new developments

This study considers commons‐based peer production (CBPP) by examining the organizational processes of the free/libre open‐source software community, Drupal. It does so by exploring the sociotechnical systems that have emerged around both Drupal's development and its face‐to‐face communitarian events. There has been criticism of the simplistic nature of previous research into free software; this study

Citation analysis, as a tool for quantitative studies of science, has long emphasized direct citation relations, leaving indirect or high‐order citations overlooked. However, a series of early and recent studies demonstrate the existence of indirect and continuous citation impact across generations. Adding to the literature on high‐order citations, we introduce the concept of a citation cascade : the

This paper examines the role of privacy in the health context by investigating the influence of privacy concerns and perceived benefits on individuals' acceptance of health technologies used by healthcare providers and their own adoption of mobile health technologies. The study adopts a two‐stage sequential mixed‐methods design. The first stage is a quantitative survey of 447 citizens from two countries

This conceptual article argues for the value of an approach to privacy in the digital information environment informed by Luciano Floridi's philosophy of information and information ethics. This approach involves achieving informational privacy, through the features of anonymity and obscurity, through an optimal balance of ontological frictions. This approach may be used to modify models for information

Social media data (SMD) offer researchers new opportunities to leverage those data for their work in broad areas such as public opinion, digital culture, labor trends, and public health. The success of efforts to save SMD for reuse by researchers will depend on aligning data management and archiving practices with evolving norms around the capture, use, sharing, and security of datasets. This paper

This article discusses the sources of information used by refugees as they navigate integration systems and processes. The study used interviews to examine how refugees and asylum seekers dealt with their information needs, finding that information gaps were bridged through people and places. People included friends, solicitors, and caseworkers, whereas places included service providers, detention

As news headlines report on high‐profile online privacy breaches and the potential negative consequences for users, users are becoming concerned about their privacy. While much research has focused on the concerns of younger generations, few studies have investigated older adults, specifically those aged 65+ years. This study analyzes in‐depth interviews with 40 older adults living in East York, Toronto

Filtering, vetting, and verifying digital information is an area of core interest in information science. Online fake news is a specific type of digital misinformation that poses serious threats to democratic institutions, misguides the public, and can lead to radicalization and violence. Hence, fake news detection is an important problem for information science research. While there have been multiple

The relationship between information and control interests social scientists; however, much prior work has focused on organizations rather than families. Work on interactive information behaviors has also focused on organizations and on collaboration rather than conflict. Therefore, in families managing chronic illness, we investigated information behaviors in the context of health‐related social control

Higher education institutions are continuing to develop their capacity for learning analytics (LA), which is a sociotechnical data‐mining and analytic practice. Institutions rarely inform their students about LA practices, and there exist significant privacy concerns. Without a clear student voice in the design of LA, institutions put themselves in an ethical gray area. To help fill this gap in practice

University libraries are partnering with disciplinary data producers to provide long‐term digital curation of research data sets. Managing data set producer expectations and guiding future development of library services requires understanding the decisions libraries make about curatorial activities, why they make these decisions, and the effects on future data reuse. We present a study, comprising

Privacy expectations during disasters differ significantly from nonemergency situations. This paper explores the actual privacy practices of popular disaster apps, highlighting location information flows. Our empirical study compares content analysis of privacy policies and government agency policies, structured by the contextual integrity framework, with static and dynamic app analysis documenting

Data protection laws, including the European Union General Data Protection Regulation, regulate aspects of online personalization. However, the data protection lens is too narrow to analyze personalization. To define conditions for personalization, we should understand data protection in its larger fundamental rights context, starting with the closely connected right to privacy. If the right to privacy

In this opinion paper, we argue that global health crises are also information crises. Using as an example the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID‐19) epidemic, we (a) examine challenges associated with what we term “global information crises”; (b) recommend changes needed for the field of information science to play a leading role in such crises; and (c) propose actionable items for short‐ and long‐term

Employers are increasingly using information and communication technologies to monitor employees. Such workplace surveillance is extensive in the United States, but its experience and potential consequences differ across groups based on gender. We thus sought to identify whether self‐reported male and female employees differ in the extent to which they find the use of workplace cameras equipped with

File sharing is an integral component of modern work. Files can be shared either using Group Information Management (GIM), where collaborators exploit a common repository (e.g., the cloud), or Personal Information Management (PIM), where files are sent via email attachments, and collaborators store files individually in personal collections. Given the recent prevalence of GIM, we compare the effects

The emergence of open access (OA) publishing has altered incentives and opportunities for academic stakeholders and publishers. These changes have yielded a variety of new economic and academic niches, including journals with questionable peer‐review systems and business models, commonly dubbed “predatory publishing.” Empirical analysis of Cabellʼs Journal Blacklist reveals substantial diversity in

Credibility assessment is a crucial component in the process of peopleʼs health information seeking, especially in the web context. Finding “credible” health information from a plethora of information on the web may be more challenging for older adults, who have relatively less experience with the Internet. This article reports on the findings of an exploratory study of older adultsʼ credibility assessments

This study investigated the stability of Twitter counts of scientific publications over time. For this, we conducted an analysis of the availability statuses of over 2.6 million Twitter mentions received by the 1,154 most tweeted scientific publications recorded by Altmetric.com up to October 2017. The results show that of the Twitter mentions for these highly tweeted publications, about 14.3% had

Open access has long been an ideal of academic publishing. Yet, contrary to initial expectations, cost of access to published scientific knowledge increased following the advent of the Internet and electronic processing. An analysis of the ethicality of current arrangements in academic publishing shows that monetization and the sequestering of scientific knowledge behind paywalls breach the principle

For laypeople, searching online health information resources can be challenging due to topic complexity and the large number of online sources with differing quality. The goal of this article is to examine, among all the available online sources, which online sources laypeople select to address their health‐related information needs, and whether or how much the severity of a health condition influences

The benefits of open data for helping to address societal problems and strengthen communities are well recognized, and unfortunately previous studies found that smaller communities are often excluded from the current data ecosystem because of existing technological, technical, cognitive, and practical barriers. This study aims to investigate the process of communitiesʼ data use for community development

Recent efforts in biomedical visual question answering (VQA) research rely on combined information gathered from the image content and surrounding text supporting the figure. Biomedical journals are a rich source of information for such multimodal content indexing. For multipanel figures in these journals, it is critical to develop automatic figure panel splitting and label recognition algorithms to

Media platforms, technological systems, and search engines act as conduits and gatekeepers for all kinds of information. They often influence, reflect, and reinforce gender stereotypes, including those that represent occupations. This study examines the prevalence of gender stereotypes on digital media platforms and considers how human efforts to create and curate messages directly may impact these

The beginning of the 21st century attested to the first movements toward information architecture (IA), originating from the field of library and information science (LIS). IA is acknowledged as an important meta‐discipline concerned with the design, implementation, and maintenance of digital information spaces. Despite the relevance of IA, there is little research about the subject within LIS, and

We investigate the state of multilingualism across the social sciences and humanities (SSH) using a comprehensive data set of research outputs from seven European countries (Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, Flanders [Belgium], Norway, Poland, and Slovenia). Although English tends to be the dominant language of science, SSH researchers often produce culturally and societally relevant work in their

We unpack the complexities of the crowdfunder community by identifying different archetypes of crowdfunders funding technology projects on Kickstarter.com. Drawing on the extant literature on innovation adoption and opinion leadership, we propose two dimensions of crowdfunders that capture the heterogeneity in crowdfundersʼ behavior: opinion leadership and interest specialization of crowdfunders. Using

The rapid and wide dissemination of up‐to‐date, localized information is a central issue during disasters. Being attributed to the original 140‐character length, Twitter provides its users with quick‐posting and easy‐forwarding features that facilitate the timely dissemination of warnings and alerts. However, a concern arises with respect to the terseness of tweets that restricts the amount of information

The documentary's core argument is that big data and targeted data have been used successfully to influence enough “persuadable” voters to influence the outcome of key elections such as the Brexit referendum and the 2016 US presidential race, and the film pushes this theme by picking just the right facts to make a case. This review will attempt to put The Great Hack in its historical, political, and

Characterizing the leadership in research is important to revealing the interaction pattern and organizational structure through research collaboration. This research defines the leadership role based on the corresponding author's affiliation, and presents the first quantitative research on the factors and evolution of 5 proximity dimensions (geographical, cognitive, institutional, social, and economic)

There is currently a paucity of evidence‐based strategies that have been shown to increase citations of peer‐reviewed articles following their publication. We conducted a 12‐month randomized controlled trial to examine whether the promotion of article links in an online cross‐publisher distribution platform (TrendMD) affects citations. In all, 3,200 articles published in 64 peer‐reviewed journals across

Higher education institutions are mining and analyzing student data to effect educational, political, and managerial outcomes. Done under the banner of “learning analytics,” this work can—and often does—surface sensitive data and information about, inter alia, a student's demographics, academic performance, offline and online movements, physical fitness, mental wellbeing, and social network. With these

Journals play a critical role in the scientific process because they evaluate the quality of incoming papers and offer an organizing filter for search. However, the role of journals has been called into question because new preprint archives and academic search engines make it easier to find articles independent of the journals that publish them. Research on this issue is complicated by the deeply

Libraries play a central role for youth and digital learning. As libraries transition to learning spaces, youth librarians can engage in aspects of democratic design that empowers youth. Participatory design (PD) is a user‐centered design method that can support librarians in the democratic development of digital learning spaces. However, while PD has been used in libraries, we have little knowledge

Digital exclusion is high on the international agenda and covers a variety of inequalities in access to and use of digital technologies, and in the skills and motivation needed for their adoption. This research contributes to the discussion on solving digital exclusion issues by addressing the emergent roles and challenges of Lithuanian public libraries in reducing the digital divide. The article combines

Information service providers often require evidence from multiple, heterogeneous information sources to better characterize users and offer personalized service. In many cases, statistic information (for example, users' profiles) and sequentially dynamic information (for example, logs of interaction with information systems) are two prominent sources that can be combined to achieve optimized results

Collaborations are pervasive in current science. Collaborations have been studied and encouraged in many disciplines. However, little is known about how a team really functions from the detailed division of labor within. In this research, we investigate the patterns of scientific collaboration and division of labor within individual scholarly articles by analyzing their co‐contributorship networks

In using the Internet to solve everyday problems, older adults tend to find fewer correct answers compared to younger adults. Some authors have argued that these differences could be explained by age‐related decline. The present study aimed to analyze the relationship between web‐searching navigation and usersʼ age, considering the Intelligence Quotient (IQ) and frequency of Internet and personal computer

Online health question‐and‐answer consultation with physicians is becoming a common phenomenon. However, it is unclear how users identify the most satisfying reply. Based on the dual‐process theory of knowledge adoption, we developed a conceptual model and empirical method to study which factors influence adoption of a reply. We extracted 6 variables for argument quality (Ease of understanding, Relevance

Research collaboration is promoted by governments and research funders, but if the relative prevalence and merits of collaboration vary internationally then different national and disciplinary strategies may be needed to promote it. This study compares the team size and field normalized citation impact of research across all 27 Scopus broad fields in the 10 countries with the most journal articles

The forced displacement and transnational migration of millions of people around the world is a growing phenomenon that has been met with increased surveillance and datafication by a variety of actors. Small humanitarian organizations that help irregular migrants in the United States frequently do not have the resources or expertise to fully address the implications of collecting, storing, and using

This study validates the adaptation of a loyalty scale for the library scenario and recovers the hierarchical nature of the perceived service quality (PSQ) by operationalizing it as a second‐order level construct, composed by the determinants of service quality (DSQ) identified by Parasuraman, Zeithaml, and Berry in 1985. Our hypothesis was that DSQ are distinct and complementary dimensions, in opposition

Efforts to combat continuing gender inequalities in academia need to be informed by evidence about where differences occur. Citations are relevant as potential evidence in appointment and promotion decisions, but it is unclear whether there have been historical gender differences in average citation impact that might explain the current shortfall of senior female academics. This study investigates

The use of implicit relevance feedback from neurophysiology could deliver effortless information retrieval. However, both computing neurophysiologic responses and retrieving documents are characterized by uncertainty because of noisy signals and incomplete or inconsistent representations of the data. We present the first-of-its-kind, fully integrated information retrieval system that makes use of online

Open-access mega-journals (OAMJs) are characterized by their large scale, wide scope, open-access (OA) business model, and "soundness-only" peer review. The last of these controversially discounts the novelty, significance, and relevance of submitted articles and assesses only their "soundness." This article reports the results of an international survey of authors (n = 11,883), comparing the responses

This research article puts forward a method to identify the national heritage of authors based on the morphology of their surnames. Most studies in the field use variants of dictionary-based surname methods to identify ethnic communities, an approach that suffers from methodological limitations. Using the public file of ORCID (Open Researcher and Contributor ID) identifiers in 2015, we developed a

A cross-disciplinary examination of the user behaviors involved in seeking and evaluating data is surprisingly absent from the research data discussion. This review explores the data retrieval literature to identify commonalities in how users search for and evaluate observational research data in selected disciplines. Two analytical frameworks, rooted in information retrieval and science and technology

In the Introduction to this special issue on the Social Informatics of Knowledge, the editors of the issue reflect on the history of the term "social informatics" and how the articles in this issue both reflect and depart from the original concept. We examine how social informatics researchers have studied knowledge, computerization, and the workplace, and how all of those have evolved over time. We

Human spatial concepts, such as the concept of place, are not immediately translatable to the geometric foundations of spatial databases and information systems developed over the past 50 years. These systems typically rest on the concepts of objects and fields, both bound to coordinates, as two general paradigms of geographic representation. The match between notions of place occurring in everyday

The Internet has become the first source of consumer health information. Most theoretical and empirical studies are centered on information needs and seeking, rather than on information outcomes. This review's purpose is to explore and explain health outcomes of Online Consumer Health Information (OCHI) in primary care. A participatory systematic mixed studies review with a framework synthesis was

Word segmentation is the task of inserting or deleting word boundary characters in order to separate character sequences that correspond to words in some language. In this article we propose an approach based on a beam search algorithm and a language model working at the byte/character level, the latter component implemented either as an n-gram model or a recurrent neural network. The resulting system