Purpose The purpose of this paper is to identify and design the axial coding pattern of the factors affecting the unplanned use behavior of users of the academic libraries and information centers. Design/methodology/approach The study as an applied research with a qualitative approach employed the grounded theory. The data collection tool was a deep and semi-structured interview. The interviews data were analyzed and coded during three stages of open, axial and selective coding using the MAXQDA 10 qualitative analysis software. The research population consisted of faculty members and experts in three areas of library and information science, management and psychology. Using the combined targeted sampling method (targeted and then the snowball), 12 subjects were selected as the sample size. Findings According to the research findings, the factors affecting the unplanned behavior of users in the use of academic libraries resources and services were identified as factors related to technology, environmental factors, information resources, information services, human resources, individual features, time position factor, cultural factors and social factors. Accordingly, the axial coding pattern of this type of behaviors was designed. Research limitations/implications The research limitations include the lack of theoretical basis related to the unplanned behavior issue in the field of library and information science and the lack of full familiarity of most of the experts in the field of library and information science with this topic. These factors lead to the necessity of explaining the subject under discussion. Originality/value The unplanned behavior of clients can be utilized to persuade users to use the information resources and library services so that the costs spent on their preparation and collection will be justifiable. The current research addressed this aspect of the unplanned information-seeking behavior.

PurposeThe main purpose of this investigation is to define the status of the application of information technology in academic libraries located in Kerman, the center and largest city of Kerman Province, Iran, and to understand the problems and difficulties in using information technology in these libraries.Design/methodology/approachThe survey has covered 17 libraries belonging to Shahid Bahonar University, Kerman Medical University and Islamic Azad University. Two kinds of questionnaires were distributed to libraries – one for librarians and the other for library staff. The findings of the survey have been analyzed using SPSS software.FindingsResults show that the level of application of information technology in Kerman academic libraries is acceptable but they should improve their status to match with ever increasing demand for better librarian services at universities; the most important problem and serious difficulty is the lack of educated librarians, which needs a suitable investment and planning; and, although about 70 percent of librarians in Kerman academic libraries have participated in related training courses, the most serious difficulty in using information technology is still the lack of educated librarians.Practical implicationsBased on the research findings, several suggestions for improvements can be made, for example: recruitment of multi‐skilled librarians familiar with information technologies related to the mechanism of work in academic libraries; planning and designing ongoing courses of information technology and related skills; promotion and introduction of various academic library services through compiling and publishing manuals and guides; equipping academic libraries with more information technology facilities; having a special budget for development of information technology infrastructure; overcoming telecommunication barriers and shortcomings to better use of information technology; and mechanization of all academic library departments to provide information services more optimally and speedily.Originality/valueThe research studies the rate of using information technologies in Iran as a developing country. Hopefully, uncovering and understanding some unknowns based on such investigations can help to address the digital divide within universities and countries governing them.

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Purpose -This research aims to study the state of online resources cited in scholarly library and information science (LIS) journals which are ranked in ISI and available in the Emerald database in terms of accessibility and decay. Design/methodology/approach -Four LIS journals published by Emerald were selected from Thomson Reuters' JCR. The journals' issues from 2005 to 2008 were downloaded directly from the publisher web site and checked in terms of decay and availability of individual cited URLs. Findings -Original accessibility of studied online resources was 64 percent, which improved to 95 percent. The main adopted strategies that returned more results were using the Wayback Machine and Google, which revived online resources by 17 percent and 12 percent respectively. Practical implications -To increase the rate of web citations accessibility, some recommendations, including avoiding long URLs, citing documents found in digital collections availability on the web, working through systematic checking of the web citations before publication, getting backup of cited information, using the more stable file formats and domains, and utilizing tools like WebCite w -enhanced reference and a digital object identifier (DOI w ) system are suggested. Originality/value -A study which examines the accessibility and decay of web citations used by authors of articles published in ISI-ranked LIS journals available in the Emerald database has not been already done. This paper can thus contribute to the knowledge of this field as well as quality of such literature for web content providers and publishers, authors and researchers.

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to study the presence of highly cited papers of Nature in social media websites and tools. It also tries to examine the correlation between altmetric and bibliometric indicators. Design/methodology/approach This descriptive study was carried out using altmetric indicators. The research sample consisted of 1,000 most-cited articles in Nature. In February 2019, the bibliographic information of these articles was extracted from the Scopus database. Then, the titles of all articles were manually searched on Google, and by referring to the article in the journal website and altmetric institution, the data related to social media presence and altmetric score of articles were collected. The data were analyzed using Microsoft Excel and SPSS. Findings According to the results of the study, from 1,000 articles, 989 of them (98.9 per cent) were mentioned at least once in different social media websites and tools. The most used altmetric source in highly cited articles was Mendeley (98.9 per cent), followed by Citeulike (79.8 per cent) and Wikipedia (69.4 per cent). Most Tweets, blog posts, Facebook posts, news stories, readers in Mendeley, Citeulike and Connotea and Wikipedia citations belonged to the article titled “Mastering the game of Go with deep neural networks and tree search”. The highest altmetric score was 3,135 which belonged to this paper. Most tweeters and articles’ readers were from the USA. The membership type of the tweeters was public membership. In terms of fields of study, most readers were PhD students in Agricultural and Biological Sciences. Finally, the results of Spearman’s Correlation revealed positive significant statistical correlation between all altmetric indicators and received citations of highly cited articles (p-value = 0.0001). Practical implications The results of this study can help researchers, editors and editorial boards of journals better understand the importance and benefits of using social media and tools to publish articles. Originality/value Altmetrics is a relatively new field, and in particular, there are not many studies related to the presence of articles in various social media until now. Accordingly, in this study, a comprehensive altmetric analysis was carried out on 1000 most-cited articles of one of the world's most reliable journals.