Literary runaway: Increasingly more references cited per academic research article from 1980 to 2019

References are employed in most academic research papers to give credits and to reflect scholarliness. With the upsurge in academic publications in recent decades, we are curious to know how the number of references cited per research article has changed across different disciplines over that time. The results of our study showed significant linear growth in reference density in eight disciplinary categories between 1980 and 2019 indexed in Web of Science. It appears that reference saturation is not yet in sight. Overall, the general increase in the number of publications and the advanced accessibility of the Internet and digitized documents may have promoted the growth in references in certain fields. However, the seemingly runaway tendency should be well appreciated and objectively assessed. We suggest that authors focus on their research itself rather than on political considerations during the process of writing, especially the selection of important references to cite.

Ethics and digital collections: a selective overview of evolving complexities

PurposeDigital collections are becoming more commonplace at libraries, archives and museums around the world, creating potential for improved accessibility to information that may otherwise remain hidden and further support for intellectual exploration. As a result of the growing potential for digital collections to inform and influence, the conversation surrounding ethics and digital collections needs to be continually examined and adapted as technologies evolve, user expectations change and digital information plays an increasing role in our everyday lives. In this context, this paper presents an overview of multifaceted ethical realities that impact the how, why and what digital information is created, accessed and preserved.Design/methodology/approachWritten from the perspective of a digital collections librarian, this paper relies on existing research in presenting ethical considerations and complements that research with professional observations in providing subsequent reflections on addressing challenges in the age of digital information.FindingsThere are and should be considerations given to not only what information is contained in a given collection, but also how that information is selected, accessed and consumed by the public. The conclusions offered are designed to provoke reflection on the evolving and interconnected nature of information and ethics in the context of digital collections.Originality/valueInformation ethics is multifaceted, with one of those facets relating directly to digital collections. This paper demonstrates that digital collections are more complex than simply a collection of digitized documents and photographs. As the field of information management continually evolves and adapts, so, too, do the ethical realizations identified in this paper, all of which go beyond the (virtual) walls of a library, archive or museum, and carry the potential to have a long-term impact concerning information and its integrity, equity and access.

A new source of instrumental and phenological data for Catalonia and the Balearics (1895-1908)

<p>Data rescue of instrumental meteorological measurements plays an important role in climate research, as it allows daily-to-decadal variability and changes, including extremes, to be addressed. In this context, long and high-quality series are the most valuable tool, but attention to short series is also needed for extremes evaluation and reanalysis of historical episodes. This need is even more relevant in those geographical areas with a great spatial and temporal variability, like the Mediterranean basin.</p><p>Here, we describe a new data source of instrumental and phenological observations for Catalonia (northeast of Iberia) and the Balearics, covering a period from 1894 to 1908 (until 1917 for the city of Barcelona), and known as the “Meteorological Network of Catalonia and the Balearics”. This observational network was the first successful coordinated initiative in Spain and was conducted by the<em> Granja Experimental de Barcelona</em>, an institution created by the Barcelona Provincial Council with the objective of collecting meteorological and phenological data for agronomic studies. The <em>Granja</em> created a network of 51 weather stations, supplying instrumentation and rules of observation to the volunteer observers. Most of the stations provided air temperature, rainfall, and air pressure data, and more detailed information was added since 1898, including sky conditions, or evaporation, with daily and sub-daily reports (twice a day). Regarding phenology, several stations reported various phenophases, such as first leaves, first fruits, fruit ripening and defoliation for plants and trees, and the passage, arrival, and departure of certain birds. The network, although short-lived, marked the beginning of many observatories that continued in later decades, and was the laid the first stone of the Meteorological Service of Catalonia, established in 1921.</p><p>Original observations are kept in paper sheets and have been recently digitized (scanned) and catalogued by the current SMC, jointly with additional documentation, such as written correspondence between the observers and the <em>Granja</em> (i.e., a valuable source for metadata) or special reports on intensity and duration of thunderstorms. The digitized documents (4,100 images) will be soon fully available throughout the public website “Digital Memory of Catalonia”, while daily maximum and minimum air temperature and rainfall data has already been extracted and recorded at the SMC database. </p>

Soviet soldiers of the Great Patriotic War rescued from starvation by foreign humanitarian missions in 1921-1923s

The paper draws attention to such an important historical aspect as the connection between foreign humanitarian activities in Soviet Russia and Ukraine during the famine of 1921-1923 and the participation of the people of the USSR in the Great Patriotic War. It is well known that during the famine of 1921-1923, a large number of foreign aid organizations functioned in Russia and Ukraine and provided food, treatment and clothing to several million starving children who were doomed to death without outside help. Some of these organizations opened orphanages on the territory of the RSFSR for homeless children and children left without parental care. Many of those men and women who went to war in 1941-1945 were saved during the famine by foreign organizations. Thanks to modern databases of digitized documents on the Great Patriotic War, it becomes possible to trace the military fate of these people. The paper, based on the materials of the Central Archive of the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation and the National Archive of Sweden, provides specific examples of the fate of participants in the Great Patriotic War, who were saved in 1922-1923 by the Red Cross organizations of Sweden and the Netherlands.

An Unsupervised Normalization Algorithm for Noisy Text: A Case Study for Information Retrieval and Stance Detection

A large fraction of textual data available today contains various types of “noise,” such as OCR noise in digitized documents, noise due to informal writing style of users on microblogging sites, and so on. To enable tasks such as search/retrieval and classification over all the available data, we need robust algorithms for text normalization, i.e., for cleaning different kinds of noise in the text. There have been several efforts towards cleaning or normalizing noisy text; however, many of the existing text normalization methods are supervised and require language-dependent resources or large amounts of training data that is difficult to obtain. We propose an unsupervised algorithm for text normalization that does not need any training data/human intervention. The proposed algorithm is applicable to text over different languages and can handle both machine-generated and human-generated noise. Experiments over several standard datasets show that text normalization through the proposed algorithm enables better retrieval and stance detection, as compared to that using several baseline text normalization methods.

Moda na genealogię. Rynek usług i produktów genealogicznych na przykładzie firmy Your Roots in Poland

An interest in the fate of ancestors influences the overall way we perceive the past, above all, how we understand history through their prism. The title fashion for genealogy is inextricably linked with technological development - quick access to historical sources published on the Internet. Provision of this type of service has become an important element of the global economy. Global genealogy websites have billions of user profiles, indexed and digitized documents in their databases. Genealogists around the world organize into groups, associations, to structure the process by which genealogical information is more accessible. Genealogical DNA tests are also becoming more and more popular - they help to go back much further in the family history than the preserved written sources allow. Genealogy is also a field of science that is increasingly present in traditional media as well as in scientific discourse - it is the subject of symposia, conferences and scientific publications both local and international. The Polish market of genealogy services is much smaller than the American market, but also consists of thriving organizations and commercial companies. One of them is Your Roots in Poland, which presents the entire range of this type of services offered in our country.

On-line registration of companies in the Republic of Serbia

In this paper author presents an overview of the procedure of electronic registration of the companies' formation in the Serbian law. This procedure was made possible for the first time in 2017 for the purpose of electronic registration of entrepreneurs, and shortly afterward the establishment of a single-member and multi-member limited liability company. The procedure is performed entirely electronically. It is possible to submit electronically the registration application for founding a company, as well as to electronically sign the application using a qualified electronic signature. The possibility of composing and submitting electronic or digitized documents and their electronic signing is also envisaged. Finally, electronic registration ends with the delivery of the registrar's decision in the electronic form to the registered e-mail address. The introduction of the electronic registration procedure, and then its wider and more efficient application, represents one of the important goals in further improvement in the efficiency of the procedure of establishing a company in Serbia. This procedure came to the fore during the Covid-19 pandemic, and the experiences from that period may be important in the further improvement of this procedure.

What Makes a Tax Policy Popular? Predicting Referendum Votes from Policy Text

What kinds of taxation are most politically sustainable in a democracy? The authors answer this question by applying natural language processing and machine learning techniques to a large, new corpus of digitized documents describing municipal tax policies of heterogeneous design that have been directly subjected to popular referendum in the state of California. The authors find that tax policies of different description vary systematically in their popularity with voters. In particular, official textual summaries of tax policy differ along two social dimensions that are associated with voters’ willingness to approve the tax. The authors interpret these dimensions as risk pooling and community orientation and show that measuring these dimensions can modestly improve the ability to predict the popularity of a tax, relative to a conventional regression specification that omits information about qualitative policy design. The authors discuss implications for the study of the sociology of taxation.

Internet communications of Ukrainian archives

The article considers the Internet communications of the archives of Ukraine on the presentation of archival information resources in cyberspace. Digital communication tools of archives for popularization of national cultural heritage are characterized. It was found that electronic information resources of archives in the form of digitized documents are currently the most effective form of attracting to scientific circulation huge arrays of documents contained in the state archives of Ukraine; they provide the general public with socially significant retrospective documentary information and are an important tool for quality remote user service. Each state archive of Ukraine has a website, which is an integral part of its information activities and multifaceted interaction with society and the state. A content analysis of the Ukrainian state archives' websites as an important tool for presenting electronic information resources of the National Archive Fund to the users of archival information services was carried out; its results are highlighted. It is established that the effectiveness of the website as a tool for interaction with the general public depends on the constant updating and filling it with quality information content, especially digitized documents representing the national historical and cultural heritage

Family Stories about the Great Patriotic War: Specifics of Historical Sources

The article considers the principles and methods of studying behavioral practices in the everyday life of people through their fates during the Great Patriotic War. The materials of oral history are analyzed, the subjectivity of which does not distort, but complements the information of legislative and clerical sources. Valuable information is contained in declassified and digitized documents of the Martyrologist of the Great Patriotic War of 1941–1945. Based on the memories of war and labor veterans, data of electronic resources highlighting new facets of known events, forms and methods of overcoming dangers and threats in extreme conditions are shown, which made it possible to identify a specific mechanism for the formation of the human factor in the military defense potential of the country.