Welcome to the latest issue of Publications, a journal for studies and opinion on all aspects of scholarly publishing and communication. A specific welcome from me too, as the new Editor-in-Chief. Our journal is fully “peer reviewed” or “refereed”. These expressions are synonymous although, despite modest research, I’ve not discovered the origin of the word “referee” in this context—if any of y...

Purpose – In MIP, Vol. 25 No. 1, Mike Saren argued that academic marketers need to move beyond our “traditional managerial and business confines”. This paper aims to suggest that the discipline is already on the move in that direction, and that social marketing is in the vanguard. Design/methodology/approach – Commissioned as a viewpoint, with permission to “think aloud”. Findings – The paper s...

Following two meetings as a discussion group in the previous international meetings, we moved forward to work within three specifically defined sub-groups formulating existing and future lines of inquiry with related data sets. We aimed to focus on the use of data, which ranged from qualitative think-aloud accounts to pre-post tests asking what is the role of data in our study. If there is a th...

While different approaches to evaluation will yield different results, depending on the purpose of the evaluation this article describes an evaluation approach that was aimed at investigation the mental models of users of the programme. The study was driven by questions about the differences in mental models of the instructional designers and the learners, the time learners spent working throug...

A while back a topologist friend asked me why the set of prime ideals of a ring deserved to be singled out for study. Another friend, a symplectic geometer, asked why anyone would want to put a scheme structure on the paramaters that classify a type of object (i.e. construct a moduli space). Algebraic geometry does have a reputation for being somewhat impenetrable (and I won’t say it’s undeserv...

This paper addresses the issue of creating a realistic laboratory setting when evaluating the usability of mobile systems. Three laboratory-based think-aloud evaluations of the same mobile system were designed and conducted for the purpose of comparing the impact of different approaches to creating realistic laboratory environments on the results subsequently produced. The three evaluations spa...

How do experienced users extract information from a complex visualization? We examine this question by presenting experienced weather forecasters with visualizations that did not show the needed information explicitly and examining their eye movements. We replicated Carpenter & Shah (1998) when the information was explicitly available on the visualization. However, when the information was not ...

Employing mixed-method approach, this case study examined the in situ use of educational computer games in a summer math program to facilitate 4th and 5th graders’ cognitive math achievement, metacognitive awareness, and positive attitudes toward math learning. The results indicated that students developed more positive attitudes toward math learning through five-week computer math gaming, but ...

Introduction In this panel session I will be making an introductory presentation, after which we will hear from Tim McAfee and Jodi Jessen. After all of the presenters have been heard from, we will address “questions for the future”. In my talk I would like to review: (a) the value of performance measurement and the diVerent ways in which performance measurement can serve our purposes; (b) the ...

The importance of socioeconomic position, measured at multiple levels (e.g., individual, household, area) and across the life course, for studying health disparities is now well recognized (1–7). Our multilevel study (8) reported that individual-based socioeconomic measures (IBSMs) and area-based socioeconomic measures (ABSMs) together capture birth weight inequalities that otherwise would have...