Journal or Book? : The HydroGIS Perspective on Engineering and Computing Debate

Abstract

There are numerous opinions and guidelines to select the most suited literature to state of art reviews. Even it brewed the most important articles align with the availed guidelines, some literatures may be providing controversial ideas. Whilst review the literatures' outcomes, the common practice is to assign equal weight to each literature. Eventually, these important controversial ideas conclude as a neutral concept in state-of-art scenario, whilst real is different. The initial discussion with the worldwide academics and professionals found that the novelty of the result and soundness of interpretation needs to be given weight rather than a source of publication. In the case of young students, such qualitative evaluation may direct errorprone conclusions due to less experience. Hence, to handle the controversial factors, novices require an accepted prioritization of sources with credible weights to each. Then, authors attempted to ask for the opinion of the academics from different streams and found there is a contradictory for prioritization. The academics from engineering discipline mostly trusted on books and guidelines whilst computing academics’ trust won by index journals. As the base work of the present work is a multidisciplinary research on HydroGIS framework development, it faced a problem when prioritise the literature sources. By virtue of the identified possible sources of publications through the collected literature to the literature review for the work, rationale for each source was developed using the source credibility theory. The rational was evaluated with thirty-four academics & practitioners from different disciplines. Further it gathered their prioritization & weights for each source. Then findings were evaluated with another ten experts and discussed the outcome with three senior academics & practitioners for confirmation. The present work found that the indexed journal is the most trusted source of information with a weight of 4.32 (out of 5) whilst web documents with least trust (1.49/5). Nevertheless, evaluation and confirmation discussions stressed to utilize a ratio of weights rather than numbered weights.