This study examined users' querying behaviors based on a sample of 30 Chinese college students from Peking University. The authors designed 5 search tasks and each participant conducted two randomly selected search tasks during the experiment. The results show that when searching for pre-designed search tasks, users often have relatively clear goals and strategies before searching. When formulating their queries, users often select words from tasks, use concrete concepts directly, or extract "central words" or keywords. When reformulating queries, seven query reformulation types were identified from users' behaviors, i.e. broadening, narrowing, issuing new query, paralleling, changing search tools, reformulating syntax terms, and clicking on suggested queries. The results reveal that the search results and/or the contexts can also influence users' querying behaviors.

http://ir.las.ac.cn/handle/12502/5383

Social network analysis (SNA) has been introduced to Mainland China since the end of last century. It is often stated that SNA research has experienced rapid growth in China over these years, but few studies have been conducted to prove the statement. This paper aims at exploring the research status and development of SNA in China by a critical assessment of journal articles. Our findings show that SNA is an evolving and diversified research area which has rich themes and topics, and can be applied to those studies on different levels, context and disciplines, and attract researchers and scholars from various fields and domains. In addition, the information community (Library & Information Science and Information Systems) plays a leading role in the SNA related researches. The paper also points out the research on SNA in China has some limitations, so it proposes several implications for the future development of SNA research from perspectives of information science.

http://ir.las.ac.cn/handle/12502/5386

Scientometrics is an emerging academic field for the exploration of the structure of science through journal citation relations. However, this article aims to study those subject-relevant journals' contents rather than studying their citations contained therein with the purpose of discovering a given disciplinary structure of science such as mechanics in our case. Based on the title wordings of 68,075 articles published in 66 mechanics journals, and using such research tools as the word frequency analysis, multidimensional scaling analysis and factor analysis, this article analyzes similarity and distinctions of those journals' contents in the subject field of mechanics. We first convert complex internal relations of these mechanics journals into a small number amount of independent indicators. The group of selected mechanics journals is then classified by a cluster analysis. This article demonstrates that the relations of the research contents of mechanics can be shown in an intuitively recognizable map, and we can have them analyzed from a perspective by taking into account about how those major branches of mechanics, such as solid mechanics, fluid mechanics, rational mechanics (including mathematical methods in mechanics), sound and vibration mechanics, computational mechanics, are related to the main thematic tenet of our study. It is hoped that such an approach, buttressed with this new perspective and approach, will enrich our means to explore the disciplinary structure of science and technology in general and mechanics in specific.

http://ir.las.ac.cn/handle/12502/5379