Purpose This study aims to investigate the relationship between the concreteness of searching module icons and their effectiveness in Iranian digital library applications. Design/methodology/approach This study was a correlational survey whose participants consisted of two groups, namely, users and experts. The former consisted of 174 users, all of whom were included because of their scarcity, and the latter included ten experts of knowledge and information science. First, the effective and non-effective icons were identified by users. Then, their concreteness was investigated by the expert participants. Findings The results of the study showed a significant relationship between the concreteness of icons and their effectiveness, meaning that the more concrete, the more effective the icon was, and vice versa. Furthermore, it was shown that the effective icons were representational and semi-abstract, whereas non-effective ones were very abstract. Practical implications The designers, especially digital library practitioners, should use icons that distinguish themselves as effective icons, and avoid using non-effective ones. It is suggested that they apply representational icons more. Social implications The designers of mobile interfaces and public environments, such as social networks, transportation systems and so forth, can use icons in their user interfaces that are more effective when they are perceived with more concreteness. Originality/value The investigation of the relation between the concreteness of icons and their effectiveness may help determine effective and non-effective icons. It can also be of help to designers to satisfy user needs and improve their site’s performance through using effective icons.

This study aims at introducing a new source for translation and expansion of user queries in Persian language in order to develop a bilingual dictionary. For the purpose of this study, required data were extracted and processed from English and Persian bibliographic information of journal articles to develop a dictionary for query translation and expansion, denoted as Query Expansion Assistant Database (QEAD). In this study, psychology and educational sciences journals have been selected as the sample with the potential of extension to other domains. Persian–English authors’ keywords were used for translation part and titles of English references were used to extract phrases using natural language processing techniques for the expansion part. The proposed algorithm is demonstrated. Then we evaluated this approach using human evaluation by using Google translate (GT) and Google scholar. Although the evaluation of translation part indicated 60% match between GT and QEAD, in 40% of unmatched translations, QEAD showed a better performance according to expert evaluators. Expansion part of QEAD was compared with Google scholar suggestions, which indicated that the expanded words of QEAD can equalize with Google scholar suggestions. Persian as a low resource language needs more qualified lexicon translation. In addition, using the English–Persian bibliographic information of scientific journals to mine lexicon translation is conducted for the first time. Since these journals are peer-reviewed, they can be a valuable source for translation of user’s query. Users can be informed of the most prevalent and up-to-date words or phrases among scientists, because journals are published frequently.

Introduction. The present study investigated the cost-effectiveness of article-processing-charge-funded model across the world countries in terms of its citation value proportional to the article processing charges. Method. Using a comparative citation analysis method at the macro level, it explored a sample of articles in forty-seven Elsevier hybrid open access journals that had been following the model since 2007. Analysis. The contributing countries' open access citation advantages were calculated based on the percentage of their open access citation surplus proportional to that of their non-open access articles. Their relative open access citation cost-effectiveness was obtained based on their open access citation counts proportional to the article processing charges, normalised by those of non-open access papers. The countries were categorised into four scientific blocks using Rand's categorization of countries' scientific development. Descriptive and inferential statistics were used to analyse the data in SPSS. Results. The results supported the citation advantage of the article-processing-charge-funded papers, encompassing the majority of the contributing countries in the four scientific development blocks. The articles showed relative cost-effectiveness over the years and for most countries in all the scientific development blocks. Conclusions. Publishing article-processing-charge-funded papers is relatively cost-effective, implying higher visibility and influence in exchange for the money paid.

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Purpose The purpose of this paper is to investigate the trained and untrained users’ mental models compatibility with search module icons in three Iranian digital library applications, namely, Nika, Azarakhsh, and Simorgh. Design/methodology/approach The population of this survey consisted of two groups including trained and untrained users. The trained user group consisted of 174 samples, all of which were included in the study due to scarcity of the samples. The untrained user group consisted of 8,210 samples, from which 267 cases were selected through stratified sampling. Findings Results showed that the trained users’ mental models were more compatible with the search module icons than those of the untrained users. The comparison of three software applications showed that the mental models of trained and untrained users had the highest compatibility with the search icons of Azarakhsh and the lowest compatibility with those of Nika. Concerning the untrained users’ status in terms of their fields of study, results showed that users majoring technical and engineering field and those in agriculture had, respectively, the highest and lowest mental models compatibility with the icons embedded in the user interface of the studied applications. Originality/value Since the mental models may be incomplete or inaccurate, the study of the trained and untrained users’ mental models compatibility with the search module icons of user interface embedded in various library applications may help in assessing the software’ status and the designers’ level of success in conveying the content. This also may assist information literacy specialists to estimate the required amount of training for trained and untrained users.