dec10ff.indd C&RL News December 2010 660 Gary Pattillo is reference librarian at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, e-mail: pattillo@email. unc.edu G a r y P a t t i l l o Open access citation rates Open Access articles are cited significantly more often than non-open access articles. This holds true regardless of whether the open access was mandated by institutions or self-selected by authors. The correlation is independent of other variables such as age or article, journal impact factor, authors, references cited, number of pages, country of origin, etc. Yassine Gargouri, Chawki Hajjem, Vincent Larivière, Yves Gingras, Les Carr, Tim Brody, and Stevan Harnad, 2010, “Self-Selected or Mandated, Open Access Increases Citation Impact for Higher Quality Research,” PloS one 5 (10):e13636. doi:10.1371 /journal.pone.0013636 (retrieved October 19, 2010). Information rage An international survey of white collar workers reveals that information over- load is a remarkably widespread and growing problem among professionals around the world, and one that exacts a heavy toll in terms of productivity and employee morale. On average, 59 percent of professionals across the five countries surveyed say that the amount of information they have to process at work has significantly increased since the economic downturn. Sixty-two percent of workers admit that the quality of their work suffers at times because they cannot sort through the information they need quickly enough. Professionals in each market report that between one-third and one-half of the information they receive at work each day is not important to getting their job done. LexisNexis Workplace Productivity Survey Reveals Extent, Impact of Information Overload on Workers, www.multivu.com /players/English/46619-LexisNexis-International-Workplace-Productivity-Survey (retrieved October 21, 2010). Top 20 words The 20 most frequently looked-up words in the online Merriam-Webster Unabridged dictionary in September 2010 were: pragmatic, affect, democ- racy, culture, holistic, didactic, effect, ubiquitous, reason, integrity, agnostic, hypocrite, irony, albeit, love, homogeneous, poignant, secular, capricious, and conundrum. “September Top Twenty,” Word.com: The Merriam-Webster Online Newsletter, October, 2010, www.word.com/unabridged /archives/2010/10/september_top_t_4.html (retrieved November 5, 2010). Information evaluation Preliminary results from a recent study find college students used an information- seeking and research strategy driven by efficiency and predictability for managing and controlling all of the information available to them on college campuses. Students used traditional information evaluation criteria more often for course work than for personal use. When evaluating Web content for course work, stu- dents considered the currency of the information 77 percent of the time while an author’s credentials were considered 73 percent of the time. The URL of a Web site was considered in 71 percent of the samples. Alison J. Head and Michael B. Isenberg, “Truth Be Told: How College Students Evaluate and Use Information in the Digital Age,” Project Information Literacy Progress Report, November 1, 2010, The Information School, University of Washington. projectinfolit.org/pdfs/PIL_Fall2010_Survey_FullReport1.pdf (retrieved November 9, 2010).