You may have heard of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (DNI), the U.S. federal office activated in 2005 to be the new head agency in charge of national intelligence. But perhaps you did not know that the agency holds conferences on open source intelligence–which has become more of a priority since 9/11–and that many of the presentations given at the conferences are free and available on the Web.

The most recent event, held this past July, called “Expanding the Horizons” has made many of the presentations available on the Web, which you can browse here .

Among the topics of interest to business research professionals are: Managing the Information Tsunami; Libraries of the Future; Regional Focus Intelligence; Open Source on the Web, and many others.

I’m in the midst of researching the matter of authority vs. influence vs. popularity for an article in The Information Advisor, so this page from Thomson Scientific’s SciBytes which I located from ’s Gary Price’s always invaluable ResourceShelf was quite relevant and worth passing along here as well. The chart identifies which business journals have the highest citation impact based on various time frames.

Here is the definition of how the rankings were calculated:

The above table compares the citation impact of journals in a given field as measured over three different time spans. The left-hand column ranks journals based on their 2005 “impact factor,” as enumerated in the current edition of the Thomson Scientific Journal Citation Reports^®. The 2005 impact factor is calculated by taking the number of all current citations to source items published in a journal over the previous two years and dividing by the number of articles published in the journal during the same period—in other words, a ratio between citations and recent citable items published. The rankings in the next two columns show impact over longer time spans, based on figures from the Thomson Scientific Journal Performance Indicators. In these columns, total citations to a journal’s published papers are divided by the total number of papers that the journal published, producing a citations-per-paper impact score over a five-year period (middle column) and a 26-year period (right-hand column).

I’m in the process of sorting through all sorts and varieties of specialized and interesting “social media” search engines for businesses that want to identify trends from blog conversations and other consumer media sites. So far there are two that seem to warrant further investigation: Serph and TagFetch.

Serph, which is still in beta, is a kind of metasearch search engine that specializes in searching multiple social search sites at once: these includes: Technorati, Digg, YouTube, Flickr, Google Blog Search, Bloglines, and Newsvine. It clearly is a value-added type search, as these are all potentially valuable places to find conversations that are not represented by doing a standard Google search, Technorati search, etc. individually

You can keep up with developments on Serph by reading its blog

TagFetch is also a social media meta search site, but it just searches specifically on tags–sites that it searches include: Bloglines, Technorati, Sphere, YouTube, and others. There’s a nice attractive interface that visually shows results from all of the sites at once. My only problem here was that a few sites always “timed out,” which seemed to be a regular issue in my initial test searches.

I’m still in the early stages of checking these out, but so far they are the most intriguing ones of the new batch of social search sites that I’ve come across to date.

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I just finished compiling the results of an email-based survey I sent out last month to readers of The Information Advisor. Readers are primarily hands-on business information professionals, such as corporate librarians and market researchers.

While the survey response pool was small, and 100 readers filled out the questionnaire, we did find several interesting results. The highlights of the survey, which asked questions on topics ranging from most commonly used sources, to the biggest barriers in performing excellent business research, and new roles and duties for business information professionals, will be excerpted in our March issue.

One question that we asked our readers was to tell us which sources or vendors that they trusted the most and which they trusted the least.

The most trusted source Information Advisor readers named was Factiva, mentioned by about 32% of the respondents. Factiva was followed by LexisNexis (28%) and then Dialog (18%). The least trusted source, by a fairly wide margin was D&B, named by about 12%.

I wasn’t surprised by these answers–Factiva seems to continuously do everything well and thoughtfully, and has rightly earned the trust of business researchers. D&B has long been plagued with doubts from the information professional community, primarily regarding the timeliness and accuracy of its company directory listings.

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