PurposeCurrently, the evaluation of scientific performance of universities is one of the important indicators in various ranking systems. One way to evaluate the academic performance of universities is to analyze the scientific documents of universities in reputable international databases. The purpose of this article is to analyze and evaluate the scientific publications of Alzahra University (Iran) as the top 100–200 universities during 1986–2019.Design/methodology/approachThis study was performed using bibliometrics and visualization techniques. The Scopus database was used to collect data. Affiliation search and advanced search were used to retrieve the data. Excel, VOSviewer and CRExplorer software were used to analyze the data.FindingsThe results showed that the scientific publications and received citations by Alzahra University documents during the time have been upward. At the national level, it was the most scientific collaboration with researchers at the University of Tehran. Also at the international level, the most scientific collaboration has been with the United States, Canada and Germany. In total, 80% of scientific publications were published by 20% of authors. Also, 70% of the highly cited articles were published in journals with quartile 1. Finally, clustering results showed that Alzahra University's scientific publications are in five main categories, including “chemistry,” “physics,” “biology,” “psychology and educational sciences” and “accounting sciences, management, and computer science.”Originality/valueThis study could be a good model for evaluating the performance of scientific productions of universities and scientific institutions with bibliometrics and visualization approaches.

No abstract

The primary goal of this paper is to investigate various elements of websites and compare the quality of two groups of university website designs. The procedure for the quality assessment of website design involves various modules: Extracting components of websites, validating web pages, and identifying broken links. It continues with collecting the compared data of the existing statement of Iranian and British universities websites. The 5-point scale has been chosen as evaluator tool. Different kinds of tools are used to examine above components. These tools include: World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) Link Checker, W3C markup validation service, web page analyzer, and website extractor. The W3C statistics findings show that Iranians university websites have high rate of errors compared with British university websites. These errors had been occurred in various levels of the websites: For example, HTML errors, broken links, server connectivity, image load error, and so on. It is clear that some of the websites donot followthe explicit website designing standards like W3Cs standards, and use nonprofessional designers whichcauseescalating the rate of website's errors.

Purpose The aim of this study is to identify the status of managing gray literature (GL) in medical science libraries in terms of three dimensions, collection development, organization and dissemination. Design/methodology/approach In this survey study, a structured questionnaire was used. The questionnaire consisted of 30 questions and consisted of six sections (demographic characteristics, the use of the term GL, types of GL, collection development, organization and dissemination). In total, 50 librarians from 15 medical science libraries participated in this study. The questionnaires were distributed manually to librarians by visiting libraries. All the librarians filled in the questionnaires. It should be noted that descriptive statistics and Excel and SPSS software were used for data analysis. Findings The results of using the term GL showed that 68 per cent of librarians use the source name itself. Most GL in libraries were theses (94 per cent). Moreover, a review of the status of GL collection showed that 60 per cent of libraries had written instructions for providing these resources. A total of 62 per cent of librarians stated that there is a GL selection committee in their library and the librarian is the most important member of the collection department. A total of 40 per cent of libraries were weeding GL. The most common way of obtaining GL was through deposition. The analysis of the status of GL organization indicated that 80 per cent of libraries had GL organization. A total of 90 per cent of libraries had digitized GL, and that librarians played a large role in organizing such resources. Evaluation of the dissemination of GL showed that all libraries have enabled users to access GL. In most libraries, users were only allowed to use GL in the library, and it was not possible to copy GL. Students and faculty members were the most important users of GL. Informing through the library website and the parent organization was the most important way of informing about these resources. Originality/value GL is one of the most important resources in medical and non-medical academic libraries. In this study, for the first time, the status of GL management in Iranian libraries of medical sciences was investigated. The results of this study can be useful for policymakers and managers of medical and non-medical libraries.

Purpose The purpose of this study is to carry out the demographic evaluation and analysis of the entrepreneurial orientation of librarians in Iranian public libraries using the Lumpkin and Dess model. Design/methodology/approach In this study, a structured questionnaire of entrepreneurial orientation was used. The research population consisted of 5,000 librarians of Iranian public libraries who were selected using Krejcie and Morgan table (95% confidence level and p-value of 5%) and stratified the random sampling method. A total of 365 individuals were selected as the study sample. Data were analyzed by SPSS software using descriptive statistics (frequency, percent, mean, standard deviation and standard error mean) as well as inferential statistics (Pearson correlation, one-sample t-test, independent samples t-test and ANOVA. Findings The results showed that the mean level of entrepreneurial orientation of librarians was 2.92 with an average level (µ = 3). Librarians were at an average level (µ = 3) in terms of components of innovativeness (2.98), risk-taking (2.93) and proactiveness (3.02). The status of the autonomy component (2.53) was at an undesirable level (3 < µ), and only the competitive aggressiveness status (3.12) was at the desirable level (3 < µ). The analysis of the librarian’s entrepreneurial orientation based on demographic characteristics indicated that the male librarian’s entrepreneurial orientation was higher than the female librarian’s (p-value = 0.039). Meantime, librarians with library and information science degrees have less entrepreneurial orientation than the librarians with other (non-librarian and information science) degrees (p-value = 0.01). Also, the higher the librarian’s degree, the lower their entrepreneurial orientation will be (p-value = 0.000). In addition, there was no significant relationship between librarians’ age (p-value = 0.14), marital status (p-value = 0.15) or work experience (p-value = 0.388) and their entrepreneurial orientation. Practical implications Entrepreneurial orientation is one of the significant concepts in entrepreneurship of organizations. Accordingly, studying the concept of entrepreneurial orientation and formulating an appropriate strategy is of great importance in improving the performance of libraries because libraries can be more useful and appealing to library members by enhancing the entrepreneurial orientation of librarians, delivering new, unique and tailor-made services to users’ needs. Originality/value Not much research has been carried out on entrepreneurship in library and information sciences. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study to examine the entrepreneurial orientation of librarians based on their demographic characteristics.