The improvement and expansion of higher education have been priorities of our national development in Kenya.Within a span of thirty five years since independence, we have witnessed the creation of five public universities.Several private universities have also been established.In our national universities, more professional programmes have been developed at both undergraduate and postgraduate levels and several departments now offer Ph.D programmes through research.As one of many African countries that have suffered from the effects of colonialism and marginalization, Kenya has made tremendous progress in the field of higher education that should be desired for the wider region, now defined by the Preferential Trade Area (PTA) and the Common Market of East and Southern Africa (COMESA).There has, however, been a constant lack of locally available textbooks for use at both the undergraduate and postgraduate levels.Many departments continue to use imported textbooks at a great price in foreign exchange.Worse still, the teaching staff have to relate material in these texts to our local situation and experiences.With the onset of the third millennium and the ever-growing quest for information, there is a desperate need for people to write books in various areas of specialization that are relevant to our needs.One of the objectives of any institution of higher learning is to conduct research.Research generates new knowledge and information; it extends the frontiers of understanding as we gain new insights into phenomena.There can be no improvement of higher education without sound research.The Kenya Government has encouraged and supported research in our public universities and has gone further to establish independent research institutes in several disciplines.This is testimony to the important role that research plays in the national development of any country.It is with these points in mind that we set about the task of writing a book on research methods.Research methods as a subject cuts across the boundaries of all disciplines.Whether in History, Engineering, Medicine, Education or Literature, a researcher needs the necessary tools to conduct a research study properly.We sincerely believe that Research Methods compliments arid strengthens the philosophy of our system of education by equipping the student or any aspiring researcher with the necessary tools and skills to identify a problem and look for practical solutions in a systematic way.Excellent research skills should also strengthen a person's ability to work, thirik and act independently.In writing this book, we felt a research methods book should be "skill" and "application" oriented.We have therefore tried to discuss thoroughly the necessary skills in research and how such skills should be applied when conducting a research study.This text is intended for people who will either conduct field research.Or who need to rely on literature research.It is therefore suitable for university students at both the undergraduate and graduate levels and for personnel in Government and Non-Governmental Organizations.University teaching staff should also find this book useful as a reference text for their research.The organization of the material in this text follows the format of the research process.Chapters 1 and 2 deal with the definition and purpose of research.Chapters 3-9 deal with the critical, elemen. of the research process.Chapters 10 and 12 deal with types of research while Chapter 11 discusses logistical and ethical issues in research.Finally, research and project proposal development is discussed in Chapter 13.This chapter should be particularly helpful to students who are doing higher degrees and practitioners who may want to develop project proposals.There are review assignments at the .end of each chapter to help in studying and revision.An example of a published journal paper is included in Appendix I.The journal article contains most of the components of a research report as discussed in Chapter 9.While the book lays great emphasis on quantitative research methods, it also gives an introduction to qualitative approaches in Chapter 12. Information on qualitative approaches is also given under various topics throughout the text.
The physical aging process progresses every day--and so does our understanding of it. Dimensions of Aging, Second Edition, will keep students and professionals up to date on the outcomes of the latest research studies and their implications for the elderly in the real world. Physical aging affects us cognitively, psychologically, socially, and spiritually. The book discusses how people age physically and how this aging affects other dimensions of life.The second edition of Dimensions of Aging has been updated to integrate research findings on physical aging from more than 100 different journals in myriad fields, creating interdisciplinary coverage on the topic. It provides students and professionals with what they need to know about physical aging in order to conduct clinical research and to work with clients and patients. In doing so, it retains its landmark status as the definitive reference on aging.Moreover, Dimensions of Aging, Second Edition, focuses less on explaining the measurement techniques and research design and more on the outcome of the studies and their practical implications for everyday living. This approach will enable professionals and students to do the following: -Understand the physical aging process and its effects on other dimensions of life.-Apply the latest research in working with adults and the elderly.-Become more effective in their professions.The structure of this new edition is more conducive to learning and features the following: -Chapter objectives-Key terms-Sidebars of capsule research studies-Testimonials, vignettes, and other tidbits that tie the research information to the real world-Review questions to assist students in synthesizing and remembering the information-Short lists of recommended reading for those who want to pursue the topic in more detail-A glossary at the end of the bookThis second edition is organized into five parts. Part I provides an introduction to aging, to the field of gerontology, and to the research process for studying individual differences. Part II describes the physical changes in structure, capacity, and endurance. Part III overviews the factors related to motor coordination, motor control, and skill learning for older adults. Part IV addresses physical-psychosocial relationships, including health, exercise, and cognitive function as well as health-related expectations of quality of life for older adults. Part V highlights physical performance and achievement especially to showcase the results from consistent effort and hard work of physically elite older adults as inspiration for others.At a time when many people are telling older adults what they can't do, professionals should be telling them what they can do. Dimensions of Aging, Second Edition, will equip professionals to do so.
Webology is an international peer-reviewed journal in English devoted to the field of the World Wide Web and serves as a forum for discussion and experimentation. It serves as a forum for new research in information dissemination and communication processes in general, and in the context of the World Wide Web in particular. This paper presents a Scientometric analysis of the Webology Journal. The paper analyses the pattern of growth of the research output published in the journal, pattern of authorship, author productivity, and subjects covered to the papers over the period (2013-2017). It is found that 62 papers were published during the period of study (2013-2017). The maximum numbers of articles were collaborative in nature. The subject concentration of the journal noted was Social Networking/Web 2.0/Library 2.0 and Scientometrics or Bibliometrics. Iranian researchers contributed the maximum number of articles (37.10%). The study applied standard formula and statistical tools to bring out the factual result.
Evidence from all over the world especially developing countries have shown a rapid increase in enrolment of individuals under distance learning academic programmes. In today’s modern world, one of the most important objectives of education is to produce such learners who could be self reliant for their learning process. ODL has been an instrumental educational strategy in reaching out masses from far flung areas to build their capacities. A worth mentioning example for this very achievement of ODL in Pakistan is Allama Iqbal Open University (AIOU). It is quite important to explore that what are the factors which instigate the masses towards joining ODL programmes and their impact on individuals’ capacities. The paper is presenting the survey based view point of ODL students in Pakistan about a) the reasons for joining AIOU and b) the impact of this education on development of skills to organize their studies and assess the quality of their written work which enabled them to extract important themes and ideas from the specially developed printed study materials. Findings are made on the basis of data collected through interviews of randomly selected 250 AIOU students of different levels from its 03 regions (Islamabad, Rawalpindi and Saidu Sharif). It can be concluded that distinguishing features of AIOU which turn into reasons for females to join AIOU includes; opportunity of education while staying at home, lower fee structure, study while in service, no age limits and continuation of education after breaks. AIOU offers a wide range of courses/discipline which is also an important reason behind joining the institution. A vast majority mentioned that they have learned the skill of reading, organizing their study plan and preparing lessons and can do self assessment of their written work. These skills were developed because of compulsory written assignments for each and every course of the academic programmes. An area which requires some further and specialized efforts is related to the feedback provided to students by their tutors on the written assignments. The learners can enhance their reading and self evaluative capacities up to the extent, technical feedback is being provided. So, the distance learning methodology of AIOU has been enabling its beneficiaries, through its self study model, to develop self reliance and get education which otherwise is not accessible or feasible in conventional system
Rankings of scholarly journals based on citation data are often met with skepticism by the scientific community. Part of the skepticism is due to disparity between the common perception of journals' prestige and their ranking based on citation counts. A more serious concern is the inappropriate use of journal rankings to evaluate the scientific influence of authors. This paper focuses on analysis of the table of cross-citations among a selection of Statistics journals. Data are collected from the Web of Science database published by Thomson Reuters. Our results suggest that modelling the exchange of citations between journals is useful to highlight the most prestigious journals, but also that journal citation data are characterized by considerable heterogeneity, which needs to be properly summarized. Inferential conclusions require care in order to avoid potential over-interpretation of insignificant differences between journal ratings. Comparison with published ratings of institutions from the UK's Research Assessment Exercise shows strong correlation at aggregate level between assessed research quality and journal citation `export scores' within the discipline of Statistics.
Previous research has shown that journal article quality ratings from the cloud based Large Language Model (LLM) families ChatGPT and Gemini and the medium sized open weights LLM Gemma3 27b correlate moderately with expert research quality scores. This article assesses whether other medium sized LLMs, smaller LLMs, and reasoning models have similar abilities. This is tested with Gemma3 variants, Llama4 Scout, Qwen3, Magistral Small and DeepSeek R1 on a dataset of 2,780 medical, health and life science papers in 6 fields, with two different gold standards, one novel. Few-shot and score averaging approaches are also evaluated. The results suggest that medium-sized LLMs have similar performance to ChatGPT 4o-mini and Gemini 2.0 Flash, but that 1b parameters may often, and 4b sometimes, be too few. Reasoning models did not have a clear advantage. Moreover, averaging scores from multiple identical queries seems to be a universally successful strategy, and there is weak evidence that few-shot prompts (four examples) tend to help. Overall, the results show, for the first time, that smaller LLMs >4b have a substantial capability to rate journal articles for research quality, especially
We compare the network of aggregated journal-journal citation relations provided by the Journal Citation Reports (JCR) 2012 of the Science and Social Science Citation Indexes (SCI and SSCI) with similar data based on Scopus 2012. First, global maps were developed for the two sets separately; sets of documents can then be compared using overlays to both maps. Using fuzzy-string matching and ISSN numbers, we were able to match 10,524 journal names between the two sets; that is, 96.4% of the 10,936 journals contained in JCR or 51.2% of the 20,554 journals covered by Scopus. Network analysis was then pursued on the set of journals shared between the two databases and the two sets of unique journals. Citations among the shared journals are more comprehensively covered in JCR than Scopus, so the network in JCR is denser and more connected than in Scopus. The ranking of shared journals in terms of indegree (that is, numbers of citing journals) or total citations is similar in both databases overall (Spearman's \r{ho} > 0.97), but some individual journals rank very differently. Journals that are unique to Scopus seem to be less important--they are citing shared journals rather than bein
This scientometric study analyzes Avian Influenza research from 2014 to 2023 using bibliographic data from the Web of Science database. We examined publication trends, sources, authorship, collaborative networks, document types, and geographical distribution to gain insights into the global research landscape. Results reveal a steady increase in publications, with high contributions from Chinese and American institutions. Journals such as PLoS One and the Journal of Virology published the highest number of studies, indicating their influence in this field. The most prolific institutions include the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the University of Hong Kong, while the College of Veterinary Medicine at South China Agricultural University emerged as the most productive department. China and the USA lead in publication volume, though developed nations like the United Kingdom and Germany exhibit a higher rate of international collaboration. "Articles" are the most common document type, constituting 84.6% of the total, while "Reviews" account for 7.6%. This study provides a comprehensive view of global trends in Avian Influenza research, emphasizing the need for collaborative efforts ac
DESIDOC Journal of Library & Information Technology (DJLIT) formerly known as DESIDOC Bulletin of Information Technology is a peer-reviewed, open access, bimonthly journal. This paper presents a Scientometric analysis of the DESIDOC Journal. The paper analyses the pattern of growth of the research output published in the journal, pattern of authorship, author productivity, and, subjects covered to the papers over the period (2013-2017). It is found that 227 papers were published during the period of study (2001-2012). The maximum numbers of articles were collaborative in nature. The subject concentration of the journal noted is Scientometrics. The maximum numbers of articles (65%) have ranged their thought contents between 6 and 10 pages. The study applied standard formula and statistical tools to bring out the factual result.
The journal impact factor (JIF) is the average of the number of citations of the papers published in a journal, calculated according to a specific formula; it is extensively used for the evaluation of research and researchers. The method assumes that all papers in a journal have the same scientific merit, which is measured by the JIF of the publishing journal. This implies that the number of citations measures scientific merits but the JIF does not evaluate each individual paper by its own number of citations. Therefore, in the comparative evaluation of two papers, the use of the JIF implies a risk of failure, which occurs when a paper in the journal with the lower JIF is compared to another with fewer citations in the journal with the higher JIF. To quantify this risk of failure, this study calculates the failure probabilities, taking advantage of the lognormal distribution of citations. In two journals whose JIFs are ten-fold different, the failure probability is low. However, in most cases when two papers are compared, the JIFs of the journals are not so different. Then, the failure probability can be close to 0.5, which is equivalent to evaluating by coin flipping.
This study aims to present a scientometric analysis of the journal titled Cognition for a period of 20 years from 1999 to 2018. The present study was conducted with an aim to provide a summary of research activity in current journal and characterize its most aspects. The research coverage includes the year wise distribution of articles, authors, institutions, countries and citation analysis of the journal. The analysis showed that 2870 papers were published in journal of Cognition from 1999 to 2018. The study identified top 20 prolific authors, institutions and countries of the journal. Researchers from USA have been made the most percentage of contributions.
The present study attempts to highlight the research output generated in Russia in coronary artery disease (CAD) research during the period 1990-2019 to understand the distribution of research output, top journals for publications, and most prolific authors, authorship pattern, and citation pattern. This study is based on secondary data extracted from the Science Citation Index (SCI), which is an integral component of the Web of Science. Descriptive and inferential statistical techniques were applied in the study. There were 5058 articles by Russian scholars in coronary artery disease during 1990-2019; they preferred to publish in Russian journals. The research contributions were in the form of research articles, meeting abstracts and reviews with a consistent drop in the number of editorial material and article; proceedings paper with time. Co-authorship was the norm in coronary artery disease research, with a steady increase in the number of multi-author documents in recent years.
In this modern technological era, categorization and ranking of research journals is gaining popularity among researchers and scientists. It plays a significant role for publication of their research findings in a quality journal. Although, many research works exist on journal categorization and ranking, however, there is a lack of research works to categorize and predict the journals using suitable machine learning techniques. This work aims to categorize and predict various academic research journals. This work suggests a hybrid predictive model comprising of five steps. The first step is to prepare the dataset with twenty features. The second step is to pre-process the dataset. The third step is to apply an appropriate clustering algorithm for categorization. The fourth step is to apply appropriate feature selection techniques to get an effective subset of features. The fifth step involves some ensemble plus non ensemble methods to train the model. The model is trained on a full set of features, and a selected subset of features is obtained by applying three feature selection techniques. After model training, the prediction results are evaluated in terms of precision, recall, an
We analyze the time evolution of citations acquired by articles from journals of the American Physical Society (PRA, PRB, PRC, PRD, PRE and PRL). The observed change over time in the number of papers published in each journal is considered an exogenously caused variation in citability that is accounted for by a normalization. The appropriately inflation-adjusted citation rates are found to be separable into a preferential-attachment-type growth kernel and a purely obsolescence-related (i.e., monotonously decreasing as a function of time since publication) aging function. Variations in the empirically extracted parameters of the growth kernels and aging functions associated with different journals point to research-field-specific characteristics of citation intensity and knowledge flow. Comparison with analogous results for the citation dynamics of technology-disaggregated cohorts of patents provides deeper insight into the basic principles of information propagation as indicated by citing behavior.
BACKGROUND: There is a growing recognition of the value of synthesising qualitative research in the evidence base in order to facilitate effective and appropriate health care. In response to this, methods for undertaking these syntheses are currently being developed. Thematic analysis is a method that is often used to analyse data in primary qualitative research. This paper reports on the use of this type of analysis in systematic reviews to bring together and integrate the findings of multiple qualitative studies. METHODS: We describe thematic synthesis, outline several steps for its conduct and illustrate the process and outcome of this approach using a completed review of health promotion research. Thematic synthesis has three stages: the coding of text 'line-by-line'; the development of 'descriptive themes'; and the generation of 'analytical themes'. While the development of descriptive themes remains 'close' to the primary studies, the analytical themes represent a stage of interpretation whereby the reviewers 'go beyond' the primary studies and generate new interpretive constructs, explanations or hypotheses. The use of computer software can facilitate this method of synthesis; detailed guidance is given on how this can be achieved. RESULTS: We used thematic synthesis to combine the studies of children's views and identified key themes to explore in the intervention studies. Most interventions were based in school and often combined learning about health benefits with 'hands-on' experience. The studies of children's views suggested that fruit and vegetables should be treated in different ways, and that messages should not focus on health warnings. Interventions that were in line with these suggestions tended to be more effective. Thematic synthesis enabled us to stay 'close' to the results of the primary studies, synthesising them in a transparent way, and facilitating the explicit production of new concepts and hypotheses. CONCLUSION: We compare thematic synthesis to other methods for the synthesis of qualitative research, discussing issues of context and rigour. Thematic synthesis is presented as a tried and tested method that preserves an explicit and transparent link between conclusions and the text of primary studies; as such it preserves principles that have traditionally been important to systematic reviewing.
This study examines the social media uptake of scientific journals on two different platforms - X and WeChat - by comparing the adoption of X among journals indexed in the Science Citation Index-Expanded (SCIE) with the adoption of WeChat among journals indexed in the Chinese Science Citation Database (CSCD). The findings reveal substantial differences in platform adoption and user engagement, shaped by local contexts. While only 22.7% of SCIE journals maintain an X account, 84.4% of CSCD journals have a WeChat official account. Journals in Life Sciences & Biomedicine lead in uptake on both platforms, whereas those in Technology and Physical Sciences show high WeChat uptake but comparatively lower presence on X. User engagement on both platforms is dominated by low-effort interactions rather than more conversational behaviors. Correlation analyses indicate weak-to-moderate relationships between bibliometric indicators and social media metrics, confirming that online engagement reflects a distinct dimension of journal impact, whether on an international or a local platform. These findings underscore the need for broader social media metric frameworks that incorporate locally dom
This study provides quantitative evidence on how the use of journal rankings can disadvantage interdisciplinary research in research evaluations. Using publication and citation data, it compares the degree of interdisciplinarity and the research performance of a number of Innovation Studies units with that of leading Business & Management schools in the UK. On the basis of various mappings and metrics, this study shows that: (i) Innovation Studies units are consistently more interdisciplinary in their research than Business & Management schools; (ii) the top journals in the Association of Business Schools' rankings span a less diverse set of disciplines than lower-ranked journals; (iii) this results in a more favourable assessment of the performance of Business & Management schools, which are more disciplinary-focused. This citation-based analysis challenges the journal ranking-based assessment. In short, the investigation illustrates how ostensibly 'excellence-based' journal rankings exhibit a systematic bias in favour of mono-disciplinary research. The paper concludes with a discussion of implications of these phenomena, in particular how the bias is likely to affect
Ageing of publications, percentage of self-citations, and impact vary from journal to journal within fields of science. The assumption that citation and publication practices are homogenous within specialties and fields of science is invalid. Furthermore, the delineation of fields and among specialties is fuzzy. Institutional units of analysis and persons may move between fields or span different specialties. The match between the citation index and institutional profiles varies among institutional units and nations. The respective matches may heavily affect the representation of the units. Non-ISI journals are increasingly cornered into "transdisciplinary" Mode-2 functions with the exception of specialist journals publishing in languages other than English. An "externally cited impact factor" can be calculated for these journals. The citation impact of non-ISI journals will be demonstrated using Science and Public Policy as the example.
Automatically generated software, especially code produced by Large Language Models (LLMs), is increasingly adopted to accelerate development and reduce manual effort. However, little is known about the long-term reliability of such systems under sustained execution. In this paper, we experimentally investigate the phenomenon of software aging in applications generated by LLM-based tools. Using the Bolt platform and standardized prompts from Baxbench, we generated four service-oriented applications and subjected them to 50-hour load tests. Resource usage, response time, and throughput were continuously monitored to detect degradation patterns. The results reveal significant evidence of software aging, including progressive memory growth, increased response time, and performance instability across all applications. Statistical analyzes confirm these trends and highlight variability in the severity of aging according to the type of application. Our findings show the need to consider aging in automatically generated software and provide a foundation for future studies on mitigation strategies and long-term reliability evaluation.
Overlay journals are characterised by their articles being published on open access repositories, often already starting in their initial preprint form as a prerequisite for submission to the journal prior to initiating the peer-review process. In this study we aimed to identify currently active overlay journals and examine their characteristics. We utilised an explorative web search and contacted key service providers for additional information. The final sample consisted of 34 overlay journals. While the results show that new overlay journals have been actively established within recent years, the current presence of overlay journals remains diminutive compared to the overall number of open access journals. Most overlay journals publish articles in natural sciences, mathematics or computer sciences, and are commonly published by groups of academics rather than formal organisations. They may also rank highly within the traditional journal citation metrics. None of the investigated journals required fees from authors, which is likely related to the cost-effective aspects of the overlay publishing model. Both the growth in adoption of open access preprint repositories and researcher