Volume 16, Issue 2

The purpose of this study was to determine whether the Australian print media’s portrayal of information professionals was different from the real personae of Australian staff. This was tested by content analysis of media images of information personnel in newspapers during the five-year period 2000 to 2004 and subsequent comparison of data to worker profiles and to stereotypes. The findings indicated that the majority of the Australian print media’s reporting of the information sphere does not involve the use of clichés, thus contradicting industry opinion and the existing literature on this subject.

The empirical evidence on the biomedical literature of Nigeria was drawn from 295 journals in Medline through which papers on Nigeria were published during the period 1967-2002. We categorized the journals according to their subject heading and examined the potential impact factors of a sample of the journals based on Thomson’s ISI Journal Citation Reports. Multidisciplinary journals and papers dominated the source types and were also more highly co-authored than the other subject headings; they also have the highest potential impact factor. The implications of this pattern of journal choice on biomedical research in Nigeria are highlighted.