Researchers and developers of IR systems generally want to make inferences about the effectiveness of their systems over a population of user needs, topics, or queries. The most common framework for this is statistical hypothesis testing, which involves computing the probability of measuring the observed effectiveness of two systems over a sample of topics under a null hypothesis that the diffe...

Synthesizing and building on many ideas from the literature, this article presents an improved conceptual framework that clarifies the notion of relevance with its many elements, variables, criteria, and situational factors. Relevance is defined as a Relationship (R) between an Information Object (I) and an Information Need (N) (which consists of Topic, User, Problem/Task, and Situation/ Contex...

BACKGROUND At present, there is no evidence on whether using condition-specific Oral Health-Related Quality of Life (OHRQoL) measures provides more reliable information than generic measures for needs assessment. Therefore, the objective was to assess the discriminative ability of one generic and one condition-specific OHRQoL measure, namely, respectively, the short form of the Oral Health Impa...

Waiting for elective surgery has been causing severe patient dissatisfaction and is becoming a major concern in most countries with publicly funded healthcare systems. While waitlists, which are used to rationalize the balances between healthcare service demand and supply, are almost impossible to avoid currently, healthcare policy makers could try to remove the tension through providing more s...

The primary interest of the research presented in this paper lies in the area of complex information needs. A study of awareness of complex information needs and their features has been undertaken to gain insight into the user side of user-IT relation in meeting complex information needs in business. The research has used a survey of Lithuanian business middle-to-senior managers to elicit their...

Effective use of public health law can be a powerful tool to advance the mission of public health departments to protect and promote the health of the population. However, there is little known about the way that public health officials think about law, use law, and/or interact with their legal counsel. The purpose of this paper is to examine some of the beliefs and barriers facing public healt...

Social media have played integral roles in many crises around the world. Thailand faced severe floods between July 2011 and January 2012, when more than 13.6 million people were affected. This 7-month disaster provides a great opportunity to understand the use of social media for managing a crisis project before, during, and after its occurrence. However, current literature lacks a theoretical ...

FODEM (FOrmative DEvelopment Method) is a design method for developing digital learning environments for widely dispersed learning communities. These are communities in which the geographical distribution and density of learners is low when compared to the kind of learning communities in which there is a high distribution and density of learners (such as those that exist in urban areas where co...

Although Business Intelligence is seen as priority by many companies, the level of benefits achieved varies significantly between firms. Researchers have indicated that not having an effective Business Intelligence strategy is a significant issue in regards to trying to realize organizational benefits. This paper adopting a case study method investigates an Australian energy company’s Business ...