Citation classics identify those highly cited papers which are an important reference point in a research field. To identify a paper as a citation classic we have to fix a citation threshold value. Usually, this threshold value should not be the same for all research fields because each field presents its respective citation pattern. Studies of citation classics in the literature define particular criteria and methods to set citation thresholds, which are often set arbitrarily and designed ad-hoc, and do not allow the scientific community to validate and compare their results. In this paper we introduce the concept of H-Classics to overcome this problem and provide scientific community a standardization of key constructs. We present a new and systematic method to identify citation classics. This identification method of highly cited papers is based on the H-index and thank to the properties of H-index it is sensitive to the own characteristics of any research discipline and also its evolution. Therefore, the concept of H-Classics allows to systematize search procedure of citation classics for any field of research.

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The Web is changing the information access processes and it is one of the most important information media. Thus, the developments on the Web are having a great influence over the developments on others information access instruments as digital libraries. As the development of digital libraries is to satisfy user need, user satisfaction is essential for the success of a digital library. The aim of this paper is to present a model based on fuzzy linguistic information to evaluate the quality of digital libraries. The quality evaluation of digital libraries is defined using users' perceptions on the quality of digital services provided through their Websites. We assume a fuzzy linguistic modeling to represent the users' perception and apply automatic tools of fuzzy computing with words based on the LOWA and LWA operators to compute global quality evaluations of digital libraries. Additionally, we show an example of application of this model where three Spanish academic digital libraries are evaluated by fifty users.

LibQUAL+ model is the best-known method for the quality evaluation of library services, but it has two major drawbacks. First, to measure the quality, it is devised on a cardinal scale: the service levels range from 1 to 9. However, the standard representation of the concepts used by humans for communication is the natural language and, hence, users should express their judgments by using words instead of numbers. Second, it considers that all users’ opinions are equally important. Nevertheless, users do not play an equal role in assessing the service quality, i.e., the opinion given by some users should be more relevant than the opinion provided by others. To solve these drawbacks, we present an extended LibQUAL+ model representing the users’ perceptions by using a fuzzy linguistic modeling and taking into account that users’ opinions on the library services are not equally important.

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