The purpose of this study is to clarify the present condition of academic conference presentations in the field of Japanese literary studies and Japanese linguistics. The subjects of the survey are 1,421 verbal presentations given at 6 leading academic societies from 2000 to 2009 in Japan. The investigated items are as follows; 1. Ratio of the number of the articles published after the presentations, 2. Types of media carrying the articles, 3. Time lag between the conference date and the article published date. The result shows that 23% of the articles were published in the journals of the same academic societies as the conference organizer and 4% in other conspicuous journals in the concerned fields. The proportion of the article publication after the conference presentations was 38%.This study revealed the difficulty to publish the contents of academic conference presentation in the form of journal articles in Japan.

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In this study, we investigate the current status and issues of manuals of mobile phones for elderly. First, to deal with the situation when using the manual that occurs by the concrete psychosomatic characteristics of elderly, the authors have assumed how manuals should be. Next, to the state in which the manual has been expected, the authors have assumed how the components of manual should be. And the authors have examined the manuals of mobile phones for elderly on the components and corresponding situation. As a result, it was found the problems by vision loss and presbyopia due to changes in visual function and decrease in cognition due to aging of nerve and brain have been almost solved. However, it was found the correspondence to changes in color vision by change in visual function, the correspondence to decrease in the persistence of attention and concentration by impaired judgment and experience and the correspondence to memory impairment due to aging of the brain-nerve are developing implementation. In addition, it was suggested that concrete process of arranging mental and physical characteristics of the elderly, assuming the problem, and assuming the combination and situation of components of manuals might be effective in the production of manuals.

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Purpose: We analyze the mutual impact relationships among various research fields in the Natural Sciences using a field classification with a large granularity. Here, Natural Sciences include application fields such as engineering, medicine, and agriculture. On the basis of the classification used in this study, inter-field citations account for approximately 30% of the total citations. The objective of this study is to reveal the research structure of the Natural Science field by analyzing in detail the inter-field citations. Data Source: The data source of this study is Journal Citation Reports (JCR) 2004 Science Edition (CD-ROM). From this data source, we selected 5964 journals that contained articles published in 2000-2004 and cited at least once in 2004. Using the selected journals, we constructed an inter-journal citation matrix, from which we then constructed an inter-field citation matrix. Method: We used the field classification consisting of 21 fields; this classification is the same as that developed in our previous study, except that this classification united an extremely small field to the nearest field. The inter-field citation matrix based on these 21 fields was used for the analyses of the following indexes: 1. The extent that citations in the individual fields were made from/toward other fields. 2. Hierarchical relation of the 21 fields. 3. Impact strength between each field pair (symmetric/asymmetric linkage). 4. Total influence by the individual fields on other fields (based on the field Eigenfactor indicator). Results: In general, biomedical fields had a larger size than others, in terms of the number of articles. A synergistic effect was recognized between the size of a field and the impact of the articles in the field, by considering the Spearman rank correlation between them. There was a weaker synergistic effect between the size of a field and the cited/citing ratio of the field with other fields. The result of hierarchical clustering among the fields based on their citation patterns revealed interesting information about the inter-field relationships; for example, analytical chemistry was found to be nearer to agriculture than to other chemical fields. The result of symmetric linkage mostly supported the hierarchical structure; however, we observed some differences; for instance, the similarity between the condensed matter physics field and the chemistry field was the highest in the hierarchical structure but not so high in the symmetric linkage. In the analysis of the field influence based on the Eigenfactor, a large influence of biomedical fields on all other fields was observed. Additionally, we analyzed the effect of , which tunes the influence ratio between publications and citations, and observed that α is an important parameter for determining the influence ranking of the fields.

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Recently, there are many reading support web services, which support users' communication about their impression of books. To facilitate smooth communication between users, the function supporting to meet other users with similar interests is necessary to these services. In this paper, we propose a method for discovering users who have similar interests, "NDC Tree Profiling", for reading support web services. NDC tree profiling generates tree forms of user profile using numbers of Nippon Decimal Classification (NDC) of the books they read. Then, comparing each profile, our method could discover users who have similar interest for reading. The result of the evaluation experiment, our method was statistically superior to random method. Also our method is more accurate than the method based on the number of common books, and the method based on vector space model using TF-IDF, but this difference was not statistically significant. Although sufficient accuracy improvement was not completed, the NDC tree profile proposed by this research has a layered structure, and has a possibility that a user's concern can be more delicately caught by adjusting the dignity for every class. More effective similar reader discovery may be realizable by performing further adjustment.

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The purpose of this study is to examine the image of public libraries held by people. The research process starts with designing and sending out questionnaires to students who major in library and information science and ordinary users of public libraries. This is followed by analyzing and considering the results of the questionnaires about the image of public libraries and bookstores. The result of this study revealed that students who major in library and information science tend to have a more positive image of bookstores than of libraries, while users of public libraries tend to have a similar positive image of both. People think that bookstores is more carefree than libraries.

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