Search (58 results, page 3 of 3)

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Abstract

Social network sites (SNSs) such as MySpace and Facebook are important venues for interpersonal communication, especially among youth. One way in which members can communicate is to write public messages on each other's profile, but how is this unusual means of communication used in practice? An analysis of 2,293 public comment exchanges extracted from large samples of U.S. and U.K. MySpace members found them to be relatively rapid, but rarely used for prolonged exchanges. They seem to fulfill two purposes: making initial contact and keeping in touch occasionally such as at birthdays and other important dates. Although about half of the dialogs seem to exchange some gossip, the dialogs seem typically too short to play the role of gossip-based social grooming for typical pairs of Friends, but close Friends may still communicate extensively in SNSs with other methods.

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Abstract

Despite over 10 years of research there is no agreement on the most suitable roles for Webometric indicators in support of research policy and almost no field-based Webometrics. This article partly fills these gaps by analyzing the potential of policy-relevant Webometrics for individual scientific fields with the help of 4 case studies. Although Webometrics cannot provide robust indicators of knowledge flows or research impact, it can provide some evidence of networking and mutual awareness. The scope of Webometrics is also relatively wide, including not only research organizations and firms but also intermediary groups like professional associations, Web portals, and government agencies. Webometrics can, therefore, provide evidence about the research process to compliment peer review, bibliometric, and patent indicators: tracking the early, mainly prepublication development of new fields and research funding initiatives, assessing the role and impact of intermediary organizations and the need for new ones, and monitoring the extent of mutual awareness in particular research areas.

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Abstract

Webometrics is an information science field concerned with measuring aspects of the World Wide Web (WWW) for a variety of information science research goals. It came into existence about five years after the Web was formed and has since grown to become a significant aspect of information science, at least in terms of published research. Although some webometrics research has focused on the structure or evolution of the Web itself or the performance of commercial search engines, most has used data from the Web to shed light on information provision or online communication in various contexts. Most prominently, techniques have been developed to track, map, and assess Web-based informal scholarly communication, for example, in terms of the hyperlinks between academic Web sites or the online impact of digital repositories. In addition, a range of nonacademic issues and groups of Web users have also been analyzed.

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Abstract

ResearchGate is a social network site for academics to create their own profiles, list their publications, and interact with each other. Like Academia.edu, it provides a new way for scholars to disseminate their work and hence potentially changes the dynamics of informal scholarly communication. This article assesses whether ResearchGate usage and publication data broadly reflect existing academic hierarchies and whether individual countries are set to benefit or lose out from the site. The results show that rankings based on ResearchGate statistics correlate moderately well with other rankings of academic institutions, suggesting that ResearchGate use broadly reflects the traditional distribution of academic capital. Moreover, while Brazil, India, and some other countries seem to be disproportionately taking advantage of ResearchGate, academics in China, South Korea, and Russia may be missing opportunities to use ResearchGate to maximize the academic impact of their publications.

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Abstract

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to make an explicit case for the use of data with contextual information as evidence in arts and humanities research evaluations rather than systematic metrics. Design/methodology/approach A survey of the strengths and limitations of citation-based indicators is combined with evidence about existing uses of wider impact data in the arts and humanities, with particular reference to the 2014 UK Research Excellence Framework. Findings Data are already used as impact evidence in the arts and humanities but this practice should become more widespread. Practical implications Arts and humanities researchers should be encouraged to think creatively about the kinds of data that they may be able to generate in support of the value of their research and should not rely upon standardised metrics. Originality/value This paper combines practices emerging in the arts and humanities with research evaluation from a scientometric perspective to generate new recommendations.

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Abstract

Medical research is highly funded and often expensive and so is particularly important to evaluate effectively. Nevertheless, citation counts may accrue too slowly for use in some formal and informal evaluations. It is therefore important to investigate whether alternative metrics could be used as substitutes. This article assesses whether one such altmetric, Mendeley readership counts, correlates strongly with citation counts across all medical fields, whether the relationship is stronger if student readers are excluded, and whether they are distributed similarly to citation counts. Based on a sample of 332,975 articles from 2009 in 45 medical fields in Scopus, citation counts correlated strongly (about 0.7; 78% of articles had at least one reader) with Mendeley readership counts (from the new version 1 applications programming interface [API]) in almost all fields, with one minor exception, and the correlations tended to decrease slightly when student readers were excluded. Readership followed either a lognormal or a hooked power law distribution, whereas citations always followed a hooked power law, showing that the two may have underlying differences.

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Abstract

A layered approach for identifying communities in the Web is presented and explored by applying the flake exact community identification algorithm to the UK academic Web. Although community or topic identification is a common task in information retrieval, a new perspective is developed by: the application of alternative document models, shifting the focus from individual pages to aggregated collections based upon Web directories, domains and entire sites; the removal of internal site links; and the adaptation of a new fast algorithm to allow fully-automated community identification using all possible single starting points. The overall topology of the graphs in the three least-aggregated layers was first investigated and found to include a large number of isolated points but, surprisingly, with most of the remainder being in one huge connected component, exact proportions varying by layer. The community identification process then found that the number of communities far exceeded the number of topological components, indicating that community identification is a potentially useful technique, even with random starting points. Both the number and size of communities identified was dependent on the parameter of the algorithm, with very different results being obtained in each case. In conclusion, the UK academic Web is embedded with layers of non-trivial communities and, if it is not unique in this, then there is the promise of improved results for information retrieval algorithms that can exploit this additional structure, and the application of the technique directly to partially automate Web metrics tasks such as that of finding all pages related to a given subject hosted by a single country's universities.

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Abstract

Purpose - The purpose of this paper is to claim that it is useful to assess the web connectivity of research groups, describe hyperlink-based techniques to achieve this and present brief details of European life sciences research groups as a case study. Design/methodology/approach - A commercial search engine was harnessed to deliver hyperlink data via its automatic query submission interface. A special purpose link analysis tool, LexiURL, then summarised and graphed the link data in appropriate ways. Findings - Webometrics can provide a wide range of descriptive information about the international connectivity of research groups. Research limitations/implications - Only one field was analysed, data was taken from only one search engine, and the results were not validated. Practical implications - Web connectivity seems to be particularly important for attracting overseas job applicants and to promote research achievements and capabilities, and hence we contend that it can be useful for national and international governments to use webometrics to ensure that the web is being used effectively by research groups. Originality/value - This is the first paper to make a case for the value of using a range of webometric techniques to evaluate the web presences of research groups within a field, and possibly the first "applied" webometrics study produced for an external contract.

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Abstract

Purpose - Link analysis is an established topic within webometrics. It normally uses counts of links between sets of web sites or to sets of web sites. These link counts are derived from web crawlers or commercial search engines with the latter being the only alternative for some investigations. This paper compares link counts with URL citation counts in order to assess whether the latter could be a replacement for the former if the major search engines withdraw their advanced hyperlink search facilities. Design/methodology/approach - URL citation counts are compared with link counts for a variety of data sets used in previous webometric studies. Findings - The results show a high degree of correlation between the two but with URL citations being much less numerous, at least outside academia and business. Research limitations/implications - The results cover a small selection of 15 case studies and so the findings are only indicative. Significant differences between results indicate that the difference between link counts and URL citation counts will vary between webometric studies. Practical implications - Should link searches be withdrawn, then link analyses of less well linked non-academic, non-commercial sites would be seriously weakened, although citations based on e-mail addresses could help to make citations more numerous than links for some business and academic contexts. Originality/value - This is the first systematic study of the difference between link counts and URL citation counts in a variety of contexts and it shows that there are significant differences between the two.

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Abstract

The worldwide span of the microblogging service Twitter provides an opportunity to make international comparisons of trending topics of interest, such as news stories. Previous international comparisons of news interests have tended to use surveys and may bypass topics not well covered in the mainstream media. This study uses 9 months of English-language Tweets from the United Kingdom, United States, India, South Africa, New Zealand, and Australia. Based upon the top 50 trending keywords in each country from the 0.5 billion Tweets collected, festivals or religious events are the most common, followed by media events, politics, human interest, and sports. U.S. trending topics have the most interest in the other countries and Indian trending topics the least. Conversely, India is the most interested in other countries' trending topics and the United States the least. This gives evidence of an international hierarchy of perceived importance or relevance with some issues, such as the international interest in U.S. Thanksgiving celebrations, apparently not being directly driven by the media. This hierarchy echoes, and may be caused by, similar news coverage trends. Although the current imbalanced international news coverage does not seem to be out of step with public news interests, the political implication is that the Twitter-using public reflects, and hence seems to implicitly accept, international imbalances in news media agenda setting rather than combating them. This is an issue for those believing that these imbalances make the media too powerful.

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Abstract

Academic social network sites Academia.edu and ResearchGate, and reference sharing sites Mendeley, Bibsonomy, Zotero, and CiteULike, give scholars the ability to publicize their research outputs and connect with each other. With millions of users, these are a significant addition to the scholarly communication and academic information-seeking eco-structure. There is thus a need to understand the role that they play and the changes, if any, that they can make to the dynamics of academic careers. This article investigates attributes of philosophy scholars on Academia.edu, introducing a median-based, time-normalizing method to adjust for time delays in joining the site. In comparison to students, faculty tend to attract more profile views but female philosophers did not attract more profile views than did males, suggesting that academic capital drives philosophy uses of the site more than does friendship and networking. Secondary analyses of law, history, and computer science confirmed the faculty advantage (in terms of higher profile views) except for females in law and females in computer science. There was also a female advantage for both faculty and students in law and computer science as well as for history students. Hence, Academia.edu overall seems to reflect a hybrid of scholarly norms (the faculty advantage) and a female advantage that is suggestive of general social networking norms. Finally, traditional bibliometric measures did not correlate with any Academia.edu metrics for philosophers, perhaps because more senior academics use the site less extensively or because of the range informal scholarly activities that cannot be measured by bibliometric methods.

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Abstract

Citation indicators are increasingly used in book-based disciplines to support peer review in the evaluation of authors and to gauge the prestige of publishers. However, because global citation databases seem to offer weak coverage of books outside the West, it is not clear whether the influence of non-Western books can be assessed with citations. To investigate this, citations were extracted from Google Books and Google Scholar to 1,357 arts, humanities and social sciences (AHSS) books published by 5 university presses during 1961-2012 in 1 non-Western nation, Malaysia. A significant minority of the books (23% in Google Books and 37% in Google Scholar, 45% in total) had been cited, with a higher proportion cited if they were older or in English. The combination of Google Books and Google Scholar is therefore recommended, with some provisos, for non-Western countries seeking to differentiate between books with some impact and books with no impact, to identify the highly-cited works or to develop an indicator of academic publisher prestige.

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Abstract

International collaboration tends to result in more highly cited research and, partly as a result of this, many research funding schemes are specifically international in scope. Nevertheless, it is not clear whether this citation advantage is the result of higher quality research or due to other factors, such as a larger audience for the publications. To test whether the apparent advantage of internationally collaborative research may be due to additional interest in articles from the countries of the authors, this article assesses the extent to which the national affiliations of the authors of articles affect the national affiliations of their Mendeley readers. Based on English-language Web of Science articles in 10 fields from science, medicine, social science, and the humanities, the results of statistical models comparing author and reader affiliations suggest that, in most fields, Mendeley users are disproportionately readers of articles authored from within their own country. In addition, there are several cases in which Mendeley users from certain countries tend to ignore articles from specific other countries, although it is not clear whether this reflects national biases or different national specialisms within a field. In conclusion, research funders should not incentivize international collaboration on the basis that it is, in general, higher quality because its higher impact may be primarily due to its larger audience. Moreover, authors should guard against national biases in their reading to select only the best and most relevant publications to inform their research.

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Abstract

Blogs that cite academic articles have emerged as a potential source of alternative impact metrics for the visibility of the blogged articles. Nevertheless, to evaluate more fully the value of blog citations, it is necessary to investigate whether research blogs focus on particular types of articles or give new perspectives on scientific discourse. Therefore, we studied the characteristics of peer-reviewed references in blogs and the typical content of blog posts to gain insight into bloggers' motivations. The sample consisted of 391 blog posts from 2010 to 2012 in Researchblogging.org's health category. The bloggers mostly cited recent research articles or reviews from top multidisciplinary and general medical journals. Using content analysis methods, we created a general classification scheme for blog post content with 10 major topic categories, each with several subcategories. The results suggest that health research bloggers rarely self-cite and that the vast majority of their blog posts (90%) include a general discussion of the issue covered in the article, with more than one quarter providing health-related advice based on the article(s) covered. These factors suggest a genuine attempt to engage with a wider, nonacademic audience. Nevertheless, almost 30% of the posts included some criticism of the issues being discussed.

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Abstract

Although there is evidence that counting the readers of an article in the social reference site, Mendeley, may help to capture its research impact, the extent to which this is true for different scientific fields is unknown. In this study, we compare Mendeley readership counts with citations for different social sciences and humanities disciplines. The overall correlation between Mendeley readership counts and citations for the social sciences was higher than for the humanities. Low and medium correlations between Mendeley bookmarks and citation counts in all the investigated disciplines suggest that these measures reflect different aspects of research impact. Mendeley data were also used to discover patterns of information flow between scientific fields. Comparing information flows based on Mendeley bookmarking data and cross-disciplinary citation analysis for the disciplines revealed substantial similarities and some differences. Thus, the evidence from this study suggests that Mendeley readership data could be used to help capture knowledge transfer across scientific disciplines, especially for people that read but do not author articles, as well as giving impact evidence at an earlier stage than is possible with citation counts.

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Abstract

Although news stories target the general public and are sometimes inaccurate, they can serve as sources of real-world information for researchers. This article investigates the extent to which academics exploit journalism using content and citation analyses of online BBC News stories cited by Scopus articles. A total of 27,234 Scopus-indexed publications have cited at least one BBC News story, with a steady annual increase. Citations from the arts and humanities (2.8% of publications in 2015) and social sciences (1.5%) were more likely than citations from medicine (0.1%) and science (<0.1%). Surprisingly, half of the sampled Scopus-cited science and technology (53%) and medicine and health (47%) stories were based on academic research, rather than otherwise unpublished information, suggesting that researchers have chosen a lower-quality secondary source for their citations. Nevertheless, the BBC News stories that were most frequently cited by Scopus, Google Books, and Wikipedia introduced new information from many different topics, including politics, business, economics, statistics, and reports about events. Thus, news stories are mediating real-world knowledge into the academic domain, a potential cause for concern.

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Abstract

Although peer-review and citation counts are commonly used to help assess the scholarly impact of published research, informal reader feedback might also be exploited to help assess the wider impacts of books, such as their educational or cultural value. The social website Goodreads seems to be a reasonable source for this purpose because it includes a large number of book reviews and ratings by many users inside and outside of academia. To check this, Goodreads book metrics were compared with different book-based impact indicators for 15,928 academic books across broad fields. Goodreads engagements were numerous enough in the arts (85% of books had at least one), humanities (80%), and social sciences (67%) for use as a source of impact evidence. Low and moderate correlations between Goodreads book metrics and scholarly or non-scholarly indicators suggest that reader feedback in Goodreads reflects the many purposes of books rather than a single type of impact. Although Goodreads book metrics can be manipulated, they could be used guardedly by academics, authors, and publishers in evaluations.