Page 161 - Journal of Library Science in China 2020 Vol.46

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160 Journal of Library Science in China, Vol.12, 2020

An academic analysis on the qualitative hierarchy and quantitative features
of Chinese articles in humanities and social sciences
〇a*
Ronda J ZHANG, YAN Chao, HAN Songtao & Fred Y. YE〇
It is well known that there are differences between Chinese papers of humanities & social sciences
and traditional papers of sciences & technologies, but they have never been clearly verified, so
we try to probe into the structural quantitative features of them. Based on the data of China’s
humanities and social sciences (CHSS) publications from 2013 to 2018, by using statistical
methods, we systematically describe a unique hierarchical structure of CHSS, in which the papers
reprinted by three digests belong to the first level, and the papers replicated by the “China Social
Science Excellence” (CSSE) are classified as the second level, and the papers indexed by “Chinese
Social Science Citation Index” (CSSCI) fall into the third level, and all the papers of CHSS in
CNKI belong to the fourth level. Then the features of the hierarchical structure are quantitatively
analyzed. We find that the first level papers account for only 0.21%, of the total papers, and the
second level papers account for 0.66%, while the third level papers account for 4.90%. We also
find that the number of papers reprinted by various institutions fits to the power law and is highly
unbalanced; papers indexed by CSSCI journals account for 70% of the high-level reprint; non-
CSSCI journals also play a role in the structure; the top-level digests have distinct disciplines
preferences for reprinted papers, and the proportion of papers from different disciplines at different
schools varies. Meanwhile, the three top-level digests show a great potential in identifying the
frontiers and hot spots in each discipline, and each digest has different considerations in terms of
theory, practice, and readability. We expect that the results could provide a holistic framework for
insight and evaluation of CHSS, so as to better unleash the display function of this hierarchical
structure.

A review of information avoidance studies: Domain boundaries, research foci,
and future trends
〇b**
JIANG Tingting〇, QUAN Mingzhe & WEI Ziyao
Despite the benefits of information, people do not always seek it and often avoid it. Information
avoidance is an important component of human’s information behavior in addition to information
seeking and information encountering. Given the lack of attention to this domain, this study aims
to define clearly the domain boundaries of information avoidance and identify the exiting research
foci and important trends for future studies. Research questions include：1) What are reasons,
strategies, and consequences of information avoidance? 2) What roles have different research

* Correspondence should be addressed to Fred Y. YE, Email: yye@nju.edu.cn, ORCID: 0000-0001-9426-934X.
** Correspondence should be addressed to JIANG Tingting, Email: tij@whu.edu.cn, ORCID: 0000-0002-5310-2073.