Alongside cognitive and social phenomena, many scholars have examined emotional and affective considerations in information science, but a potential emotional or affective paradigm has not coalesced to the extent of the social or cognitive paradigms. We argue information science research should integrate the social paradigm, as offered by social informatics, with affective and emotional considerations: a socio‐emotional paradigm. A review of existing literature and findings from users' motivations to participate on the Academia section of the Stack Exchange social questioning‐and‐answering site make our case. We uncovered tensions between the intended information‐centric focus of the community and users who believed social, emotional, and affective considerations needed to be foregrounded, speaking to online communities acting as boundary objects, with the “fit” for one user or community not always the same as for another. An integrated socio‐emotional paradigm shows much strength for social informatics and information science research, including uncovering hidden concerns and differences in values, as in our study. Affective and emotional research, often bubbling under in information science, should rise to the surface is not so much a paradigm shift but an integration of social, emotional, and affective considerations into a socio‐emotional paradigm.

Purpose: (1) To test basic assumptions underlying frequency-weighted citation analysis: (a) Uni-citations correspond to citations that are nonessential to the citing papers; (b) The influence of a cited paper on the citing paper increases with the frequency with which it is cited in the citing paper. (2) To explore the degree to which citation location may be used to help identify nonessential citations. Findings: Filtering out nonessential citations before assigning weight is important for frequency-weighted citation analysis. For this purpose, removing citations by location is more effective than re-citation analysis that simply removes uni-citations. Removing all citation occurrences in the Background and Literature Review sections and uni-citations in the Introduction section appears to provide a good balance between filtration and error rates. Research limitations:This case study suffers from the limitation of scalability and generalizability. We took careful measures to reduce the impact of other limitations of the data collection approach used. Relying on the researcher's judgment to attribute citation functions, this approach is unobtrusive but speculative, and can suffer from a low degree of confidence, thus creating reliability concerns. Practical implications:Weighted citation analysis promises to improve citation analysis for research evaluation, knowledge network analysis, knowledge representation, and information retrieval. The present study showed the importance of filtering out nonessential citations before assigning weight in a weighted citation analysis, which may be a significant step forward to realizing these promises.

Author self-citations were examined as to their function, frequency, and location in the full text of research articles and compared with external citations. Function analysis was based on manual coding of a small dataset in the field of library and information studies, whereas the analyses by frequency and location used both this small dataset and a large dataset from PubMed Central. Strong evidence was found that self-citations appear more likely to serve as substantial citations in a text than do external citations. This finding challenges previous studies that assumed that self-citations should be discounted or even removed and suggests that selfcitations should be given more weight in citation analysis, if anything.

The Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) is continuing to develop as a multidisciplinary, international field of practice and a topic of study itself. As the field matures, one area of interest has been the SoTL literature review. However, there has not been an evidence-based study of SoTL citation practices. The purpose of this study was to analyze one year’s worth of articles from this journal to see how references and in-text citations are used. Overall, 514 references and 954 in-text citations were found across 18 articles. A diverse range of multidisciplinary and specialized academic journals were cited; 8 percent of in-text citations cited a source other than an academic journal. Each reference and in-text citation was coded as either substantive (Applied, Contrastive, or Supportive) or non-substantive (Reviewed or Perfunctory). A high rate of in-text citations (74 percent) were found to be non-substantive, with the majority of non-substantive in-text citations (71 percent) found in either the Introduction or Literature Review sections of the articles. Conversely, of the 26 percent of in-text citations considered substantive, 50 percent were found in either the Results & Discussion or Conclusion sections. We demonstrate the use of the coding scheme as a self-assessment tool and conclude by suggesting that SoTL authors and reviewers could use it to assess the depth and breadth of their literature reviews.

Many frequent social Q&A sites to share information, with social and emotional support often important in continued use of these sites as resources for both information and socialization, but balancing these is not easy. We explored the socio-emotional motivations of users of Academia Stack Exchange and the influence of these on community coherence. Findings identified seven categories of socio-emotional motivations contributing positively or negatively to coherence. Academia SE focuses on being an information resource and on acculturation, learning, and translation, akin to legitimate peripheral participation, but empathetic concerns stress the necessity of further balancing socio-emotional and informational considerations.