PurposeThis paper focuses on the way users navigate bibliographic families not only when a user has no specific document in mind but also when he/she has a specific predefined need in mind.Design/methodology/approachTo this end, the Epic of Kings was selected as a test-bed for the study and both situations were studied based on International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions-Library Reference Model (IFLA-LRM), but the potential users (participants of this study) were not directly exposed to the entities of the model. Card sorting, interview and distributing questionnaire constituted the data-gathering process.FindingsAlmost all of the participants in this study, when they had no specific resource in mind, generated a top-down view of the family, and in this view, all of them disregarded the item entity and lots of them disregarded the manifestations also. Yet on the other side, when they were asked to assume themselves in certain situations (in need of a specific work with a predefined expression and format), they viewed the bibliographic family from a bottom-up approach.Originality/valueMost of the studies in this area regard the navigation process of users as a top-down approach and the Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records (FRBR) family as a model suitable for hierarchical top-down visualization of bibliographic families. Yet this study poses the bottom-up approach of users regarding the family.

Introduction:Citation analysis is currently one of the most widely used metrics for analyzing the scientific contribution in different fields. The Islamic World Science Citation Center (ISC) aims at promoting technical cooperation among Muslim scientists and their respected centers based on these theories. It also facilitates the accessibility of knowledge and research contribution among them. This paper aims at revealing some of the outmost features of ISC databases, in order to give a fairly clear view of what it is and what are its products. The paper consists of three major parts. After an introduction about the Islamic World Science Citation Center, the paper deals with major tools and products of ISC. In the third part ISCs’ journal Submission system is presented as an automatic means, by which users can upload journals’ papers into the respected databases.Conclusion:Some complementary remarks have been made regarding the current state of ISC and its future plans.

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Purpose The degree to which a text is considered readable depends on the capability of the reader. This assumption puts different information retrieval systems at the risk of retrieving unreadable or hard-to-be-read yet relevant documents for their users. This paper aims to examine the potential use of concept-based readability measures along with classic measures for re-ranking search results in information retrieval systems, specifically in the Persian language. Design/methodology/approach Flesch–Dayani as a classic readability measure along with document scope (DS) and document cohesion (DC) as domain-specific measures have been applied for scoring the retrieved documents from Google (181 documents) and the RICeST database (215 documents) in the field of computer science and information technology (IT). The re-ranked result has been compared with the ranking of potential users regarding their readability. Findings The results show that there is a difference among subcategories of the computer science and IT field according to their readability and understandability. This study also shows that it is possible to develop a hybrid score based on DS and DC measures and, among all four applied scores in re-ranking the documents, the re-ranked list of documents based on the DSDC score shows correlation with re-ranking of the participants in both groups. Practical implications The findings of this study would foster a new option in re-ranking search results based on their difficulty for experts and non-experts in different fields. Originality/value The findings and the two-mode re-ranking model proposed in this paper along with its primary focus on domain-specific readability in the Persian language would help Web search engines and online databases in further refining the search results in pursuit of retrieving useful texts for users with differing expertise.

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