Introduction and Publication Tips for Library, Information, and Services

3.1. Research Topics and Focus

Editorial

Introduction and Publication Tips for Library, Information, and Services

Dickson K.W. Chiu

Faculty of Education, The University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, China; dicksonchiu@ieee.org

1. Introduction

Welcome to Library, Information & Services (LIS), a gold open access, peer-reviewed journal that aims to publish original research in libraries, archives, museums, education institutions, media, NGOs, governments, and other organizations providing quality information services with a cross-disciplinary approach.

While libraries have traditionally provided information services to their patrons, other types of organizations have joined in for various purposes, such as preservation, leisure, education, promotion, entertainment, client support, social responsibility, and disparate businesses [1]. Recent technological advancement has made such information services available anytime, anywhere, multimodal, and multimedia, forming giant open resources for data mining, machine learning, and sentiment analysis [2]. These sources contribute to developing artificial intelligence and related applications to help these organizations provide better services, forming a continuous learning and improvement cycle.

Such recent developments have changed peoples’ usage habits, lifestyles, organizational strategies, government policies, and even the globalized knowledge economy [3]. Knowledge involving technologies, humanities, social sciences, management, economy, education, and many other disciplines are involved. Thus, this journal aims to provide a forum for researchers, educators, practitioners, and policy-makers to advance the practice and understanding of contemporary theories and empirical analysis from the perspective of information provision in achieving service excellence under the current globalized service-oriented economy.

2. Journal Scope

This new journal encourages submissions that present novel methodologies, significant empirical studies, and comprehensive reviews that contribute to the advancement of information services and information organizations. The journal welcomes high-quality original research articles, review papers, communications, and technical notes that address, but are not limited to, the following topics:

• Contemporary technologies, platforms, interfaces, and applications for services
• Service-oriented system innovation, management, governance, development, adoption, diffusion, and maintenance
• Digital transformation, information preservation, and business process reengineering
• Big data, social media analytics, and artificial intelligence for services
• Bibliometrics, ontology, knowledge graphics, and linked data for services and knowledge engineering
• Sustainability and education issues with information science and service science
• Educational technologies and digital humanities
• Service-oriented applications in education, social sciences, humanities, and other emerging domains
• Recommendation systems, information retrieval, and reputation/rating systems
• Machine learning, neural networks, deep learning, and large language models for service excellence
• Internet of Things, smart cities, information visualization, virtual/augmented reality, and emerging human-computer interaction services
• Information Science for the blockchain, the cloud, service computing, and other emerging service paradigms
• Security, privacy, reliability, equity, education, information integrity, transparency, and ethics in information science and service science

3. Tips for Authors, Reviewers, Editors, and Educators

Preparing each journal issue is a collaborative process involving the dedication of authors, reviewers, and editorial board members. While committing to rigorous quality standards, we also emphasize originality, relevancy, and diversity. With the diverse backgrounds of the editorial board and the Editor-in-Chief, we strive to provide a constructive and supportive environment for author development through timely feedback to enhance manuscript quality, clarity, and impact, encouraging topic, methodological, and perspective diversity. With my extensive experience in publishing in various LIS fields (over 400 publications, see: https://scholar.google.com/citations?hl=en&user=9vgZNKsAAAAJ) (accessed on 21 03 2025), journal editing, and research coaching, I provide the following tips for authors and student coaches and hope they can carefully consider this before starting their research, or at least use such tips to fix their manuscripts before submitting to this journal. Editors and reviewers can also use these as criteria for vetting the submissions and providing constructive comments.

Choosing a good research topic and focus is paramount before the actual work, critically affecting publication acceptability. Authors should address contemporary and important topics to create impact, focusing on niches they can address. Such works with proper methodology and good presentation are generally publishable. When coaching student research, we should consider their previous studies, personal experience (work or even hobbies), and career perspectives. We should work closely with them to understand their interests, needs, knowledge, and competence and make necessary adjustments so that they can be engaged. Here are some successful examples that we have adapted students’ proposed topics to publishable ones:

• Website usability => Apps usability [4]
• E-learning => m-learning [5] / COVID effect [6]
• Computer security => smartphone security [7]
• Library/museum management => arrangement under COVID [8, 9]
• Email collaboration => social media collaboration [10]
• Community of practice => online/virtual community of practice [11]
• Reference services => virtual/chatbot reference services [12]
• Librarian leadership => library technological leadership [13]

For method selection, we should not exclude qualitative studies essential for exploring new technologies, their new usage, and in new environments, which are equally publishable. While surveys seem to be the major methods used in LIS behavioral studies, researchers should not underestimate the complexity of designing the research instruments and subsequent analyses. Social media and Big Data analytics are emerging as a new approach to investigating various LIS issues, including the reexamination of traditional ones and exploration of new ones. For bibliometrics and literature reviews, this journal can only accept those concerning topics mentioned in the above section.

3.2. Ethical Issues

Authors are expected to have obtained ethical approval from their institutional review boards and may be required to produce such evidence. For interviews and surveys, participants’ consent is vital. Parental approval is generally necessary if minors (under 18) are involved. For simplicity, researchers may want to exclude them from their studies or turn to study the views of teachers and parents instead [6].

3.3. Interview Studies

Interviews are essential for exploring new technologies (e.g., generative artificial intelligence), their emerging usage (e.g., Internet influencers for sales promotion), and in new environments (e.g., misinformation on social media). The research should include a reasonable number of respondents (e.g., around 10 to 15 at least), and their demographics and background should be summarized in the article. Researchers should perform transcription, which can be automated (e.g., dropbox.com), and let the respondents check and agree to the transcript.

One handy approach to designing the research instrument is to break down each research question (RQ) into sections of detailed interview questions (see [6]). Further, the main investigation can be guided by some conceptual model(s), and each factor of the model can then be broken down into detailed interview questions. We expect the coding table and themes to be included in the article’s appendix. Only interesting interviewee responses should be cited in the main text, while the rest can be included in the coding tables as examples. Before the discussions, the overall themes and codes can be summarized in a conceptual diagram (see [14]) or mind map for better visualization. Some authors may want to present a word cloud, too.

3.4. Survey Studies

Surveys are useful for investigating general relationships and patterns, testing theories, and making predictions. Thus, choosing relevant conceptual models and theories is vital. However, we concur with most other journals that using solely any version of the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) is too general and thus unacceptable. The research should have included adequate respondents.

We expect articles to present beyond descriptive statistics; at least demographic comparisons with significance tests are necessary. For example, different genders often have different consumption and information behaviors [15], while different study levels and majors have different learning requirements [5, 16]. Such findings have significant implications for marketing, education, and other sectors.

Authors should also show evidence of instrument constituency and reliability. Those using parametric tests (e.g., t-test and ANOVA) should validate the normality of the data; otherwise, non-parametric tests (e.g., Mann-Whitney U-test, Wilcoxon Signed Rank test, and Kruskal-Wallis test) should be used (see [15]), especially with not too many samples. Instead of using traditional statistical packages, authors without the necessary facility or budget may also use spreadsheets or online statistics websites (e.g., https://www.statskingdom.com/ (accessed on 21 03 2025)).

Those with appropriate regression analyses and structural equational modeling are welcome, but authors should not underestimate the technical competence required. Designing a relevant, innovative, and reasonably comprehensive research model and related hypotheses is not easy. Besides, evidence of adequate valid samples (e.g., with an online sample-size calculator) and reliability (e.g., Harman’s single-factor test) should be provided [17].

3.5. Data Analytics

Data analytics (e.g., on social media or Big Data) is emerging to investigate various current issues, supporting quantitative and qualitative analyses with different software or programming libraries. Although this can cover many subjects with programmatic methods at low costs, the accessibility to the subjects’ demographics on social media may be limited. One possible workaround is to compare the content of distinctive user groups, such as students versus teachers on Reddit [18].

During the research design, researchers should ensure adequate data availability and ethical usage, plus estimate how well such data can answer their RQs. Simple analyses like the word cloud and clustering can help visualize the data, providing overviews and hints of further analyses. Sentiment and message counts can also hint at trends and time series analysis (e.g., the Granger causality test; see [19]). Next, entities, moderation, categories, and sentiments can be extracted or constructed for statistical analyses, e.g., linear regression, using the topic of a post to predict its sentiment. Further, a well-established theoretical framework can be used to help build indicators or discuss the results and implications [18].

3.6. Journal Article Writing and Organization

Regardless of the methods used, major journals expect quite a similar organization. Here are some tips for writing an article, at least this journal expects.

• A concise introduction to motivate the article
• A separate literature review section with further details comparing related work and highlighting the research gap and your article’s contribution. The review should be divided into subsections to improve readability and organization.
• A methodology section about the research design, sampling or data source, ethical issues, and outline of the analyses.
• The discussions should be a complete top-level section and include more citations to compare the results with related work, answer the research questions (which should appear earlier), and provide practical and theoretical implications.
• Adequate citations to support the introduction and discussion according to this journal’s style, with care about the quality of the cited source
• A concise conclusion with limitations and future work
• Anonymize your acknowledgment, and do not show grant numbers in anonymous reviews.
• The content of the figures should be translated into English (some may want to keep along the original language for word content).

4. Summary

Information sources have spread from traditional libraries to various platforms, media, and services, while users and small enterprises can readily disseminate information on social media for various purposes. The creation, innovation, and evolution of the research and practice in LIS raise concerns that range from high-level requirements and policy modeling to the adoption of specific implementation technologies and paradigms, as well as involve a wide and ever-growing range of methods, tools, and technologies. They also cover a broad spectrum of vertical domains, industry segments, and even government sectors. This editorial has discussed tips for conducting LIS research and writing good journal articles.

Therefore, the mission of this journal is to provide an open, supportive publication platform for high-quality articles developed by theoreticians, educators, developers, researchers, and practitioners across disciplines to advance the practice and understanding of contemporary theories and empirical analysis in the perspective of LIS towards the goal of achieving service excellence under the current globalized service-oriented economy.

Conflicts of Interest

The author declares no conflict of interest.