Accreditation, as an approach to quality assurance and improvement, has a hundred-year history in the United States. Other countries have started to establish such systems in the past twenty years. Recently, we have witnessed numerous discussions and some practical steps toward establishing accreditation systems in Iran. A major practical challenge for such newer accreditation systems is that...

Electronic procurement can provide great efficiencies to governmental agencies. This paper reports a real case in a small Midwestern state where an old purchase order process was replaced with a much more efficient electronic procurement system. Interviews with the manager in charge enabled modeling the old and new processes with a simulation model, which produced output that was verified as ac...

Website of Non-governmental organization (NGO) is a focal medium of sharing information in response to transparency demands and addressing trust deficits between stakeholders. Many researchers have proposed accountability approaches to measure information sharing trends through websites. This article discusses a new index to measure online disclosure trends along with the theoretical properties...

The Journal Usage Statistics Portal (JUSP) service is expanding rapidly, and aims to encompass all NESLi2-participating publishers by the end of 2011, together with all UK higher-education institutions subscribing to deals from those publishers. A key part of the success of JUSP will be the implementation of the Standardized Usage Statistics Harvesting Initiative (SUSHI) protocol for automatic ...

The case report, which has a long history in medicine, has seen its fortune wax and wane with time. We discuss the challenges facing the continued survival of the case report, including the inability of journals to cope with the increased load and increased cost of publication, ethical issues, the impact factor and the rise of evidence-based medicine. We highlight the important role that the ca...

The Eigenfactor score is a journal influence metric developed at the Department of Biology of the University of Washington and recently introduced in the Science and Social Science Journal Citation Reports maintained by Thomson Reuters. It provides a compelling measure of journal status with solid mathematical background, sound axiomatic foundation, intriguing stochastic interpretation, and man...

From annual reports submitted to the Social Security Board by State agencies administering approved plans for old-age assistance, information is available on the sex, marital status, and living arrangements of 1,063,000 recipients of old-age assistance. Of these recipients, 477,000 were accepted for aid in 42 States 1 in selected periods of the fiscal year 1936-37 2 and 586,000 were accepted in...