The credibility of an instructional simulation is the most important issue in distance education, where it may replace hands-on activities. This credibility is based in large part upon verisimilitude, a perception strongly influenced by the simulation's realism. This paper presents a case study encompassing the design process of a simulation-based virtual laboratory, which was guided by a realism principle, and an investigation of its credibility among potential users. We found that many characteristics of the environment associated with the design principle favoured its credibility, but that others had widely varying, even opposite, effects among users. A user's prior experience was shown to play a crucial but intricate role in verisimilitude and credibility judgements.
Introduction and initial motivationMany disciplines have a long history of distributing research findings by mail, even before the scholarly journal appeared. In a few fields, such as high energy physics and computer science, preprints used to be systematically mailed to a set of collaborating universities even before refereeing and publication (Goldschmidt-Clermont, L 2002;Postel & Reynolds 1985). In these and many other disciplines, however, researchers would mail a postcard to the author after publication to request a reprint of the published, refereed paper for research use. The author would then mail to the requester either a publisher-supplied reprint, or, if those ran out or were unavailable, a photocopy of the published article or of its refereed, revised and accepted final draft.
Avec le développement de la diffusion en ligne de documents scientifiques, la primauté reconnue traditionnellement à l'imprimé devient de moins en moins pertinente; les références à des ressources et documents en ligne forment ainsi une proportion significative des références dans certaines revues scientifiques, notamment celles qui, comme la RITPU, s'intéressent à l'information et à la communication. Dans cet article, on passe d'abord en revue les divers rôles des références répertoriés dans la littérature. On décrit ensuite les caractéristiques et les conditions permettant aux documents en ligne de jouer pleinement ces rôles. On montre enfin comment, dans l'adaptation française des normes de l'APA adoptée par la RITPU, certains choix touchant le format des notices des documents en ligne facilitent la tâche des évaluateurs et des lecteurs des articles. Par la même occasion, les auteurs y trouveront conseils et consignes visant à rendre plus pertinente et efficace cette dimension souvent négligée de la communication scientifique. Abstract With the increase of online scientific publications, the traditional primacy of print documents has become less and less relevant. In some scientific journals, notably in the field of information technology and its applications (like IJTHE), a significant part of the citations now refer to online documents. This paper first reviews the various roles played by citations in scientific texts according to the literature. It then describes the characteristics and conditions which must be met if citations to online documents are to fully play these roles. Finally, it shows how, in the French-language adaptation of the APA reference formats which was adopted by IJTHE, a few choices have been made regarding online references in order to ease the task of both referees and readers. By the same token, authors will find guidelines and suggestions which should improve the relevance and efficiency of this often overlooked dimension of scientific communication.
An exact decomposition of the diffracted field into a direct wave and a boundary diffraction wave is obtained for an incident inhomogeneous wave, namely, the complex-source-point spherical wave. Our result, in the paraxial approximation, is consistent with already published results on the diffraction of a Gaussian beam.
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