Volume 31, Issue 2

Background. The Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution guides two social goods exhibiting an essential tension: effective law enforcement search and seizure, and protection of privacy. Unreliable information may subvert the U.S. judicial process. In Fourth Amendment cases involving the use of dogs to sniff out drugs, the validity of this Constitutional guidance is called into question by: the capabilities of the dog, the dog’s training, the nature of human-canine interaction, the questionable objectivity of law enforcement officials who base the legitimacy of their searches upon dogs’ alerts, and the knowledge of judges and lawyers of the capabilities of human-canine search teams. Each of these elements is characterized by and generates many kinds of information. Concerns about such information, however, are major.
Objective. We explore these concerns through a detailed examination of the 2013 U.S. Supreme Court decision Florida v. Harris, draw some policy conclusions about the implications of this use of unreliable information in the judicial system, and provide a brief summary of the information-centric questions the paper considers.

Background. While the use of citations for assessing research impact is well-studied, there is little work that investigates the content introduced into the citing documents through citations and the linguistic expressions used to represent the cited content
Objectives. This study analysed the types of content introduced into citing documents using the citations (cited content) and units of linguistic expressions used to represent the cited content.
Methods. We classified the expressions representing the cited content according to the unit of linguistic expressions (terms and clauses) and classified the cited content into conceptual categories. We adopted different frameworks for the classification of cited content represented by terms and clauses. The categories for terms were domain specific and the categories for clauses took into account subjectivity and generality. We also described the detailed categories of cited content with examples and provided seven types of cited content for clauses.
Results. We found that among the expressions representing cited content, terms constituted about 40% and clauses constituted about 60%. The majority of the cite terms were domain specific; and 35% of the cite terms referred to unique concepts. Of the cite clauses, 50% were objective and term-specific, 40% were objective and general, and 10% were subjective.
Contributions. This research provided a description of cite units and elaborated on the categories for cited content. The results showed basic types of cited content and clarified the distribution of cite units.

Objectives. This study examined the relationship between information processing styles and information seeking, and its moderation by information anxiety. Analytical information processing and intuitive information processing are the two types of information processing styles examined. Information seeking was measured by the number of additional pieces of information sought by participants.
Methods. Questionnaires were distributed to postgraduate students of IAU Ahvaz University, Iran, selected using stratified sampling based on educational subgroups including basic science, agricultural science, engineering, and humanities. 370 valid responses were collected and analyzed.
Results. From the correlation analysis, analytical information processing style (r= 0.53), intuitive information processing style (r=0.44), and anxiety (r=0.51) were all found to have a moderately strong impact on information seeking behavior, significant at the 0.01 level. Linear regression models were developed with information seeking behavior as dependent variable. A significant interaction between anxiety and analytical information processing style was found.
Contributions. The multiple linear regression results indicate that analytical information processing style and anxiety are significant predictors of students’ information-seeking behavior. Moreover, anxiety moderates the effect of the analytical style in that high anxiety reduces the effect of the analytical style.