Much has been written about the potential and pitfalls of macroscopic web-based link analysis, yet there have been no studies that have provided clear statistical evidence that any of the proposed calculations can produce results over large areas of the web that correlate with phenomena external to the Internet. This article attempts to provide such evidence through an evaluation of Ingwersen’s (1998) proposed external Web Impact Factor (WIF) for the original use of the web: the interlinking of academic research. In particular, it studies the case of the relationship between academic hyperlinks and research activity for universities in Britain, a country chosen for its variety of institutions and the existence of an official government rating exercise for research. After reviewing the numerous reasons why link counts may be unreliable, it demonstrates that four different WIFs do, in fact, correlate with the conventional academic research measures. The WIF delivering the greatest correlation with research rankings was the ratio of web pages with links pointing at research-based pages to faculty numbers. The scarcity of links to electronic academic papers in the data set suggests that, in contrast to citation analysis, this WIF is measuring the reputations of universities and their scholars, rather than the quality of their publications.

The Web is revolutionizing the entire scholarly communication process and changing the way that researchers exchange information. In this paper, we analyze two views of information production and use in computer-related research based on citation analysis of PDF and Postcript formatted publications on the Web using autonomous citation indexing (ACI), and a parallel citation analysis of the journal literature indexed by the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI) in SCISEARCH. Our goal is to establish a baseline profile of computer science “literature” as it appears in the published journals and as it appears on the publicly available Web. From this starting point, we hope to identify additional research areas dealing with information dissemination and citation practices in computer science and the utility of autonomous citation indexing on the Web as an adjunct to commercial indexing.

In this paper we introduce a new data gathering method “Web/URL Citation ” and use it and Google Scholar as a basis to compare traditional and Web-based citation patterns across multiple disciplines. For this, we built a sample of 1,650 articles from 108 Open Access (OA) journals published in 2001 in four science and four social science disciplines. We recorded the number of citations to the sample articles using several methods based upon the ISI Web of Science, Google Scholar and the Google search engine (Web/URL citations). For each discipline, we found significant correlations between ISI citations and both Google Scholar and Google Web/URL citations; with similar results when using total or average citations, and when comparing within and across (most) journals. We also investigated disciplinary differences. Google Scholar citations were more numerous than ISI citations in our four social science disciplines as well as in computer science, suggesting that Google Scholar is a more comprehensive tool for citation tracking in the social sciences and perhaps also in fast-moving fields where conference papers are highly valued and published online. The results for Web/URL citations suggested that counting a maximum of one hit per site produces a better measure for assessing the impact of OA journals or articles, because replicated web citations are very common within individual sites. The results can be considered as additional evidence that there is some commonality between traditional and Web-extracted citations. 1.

This article explains the Guild Publishing Model, provides some examples, and discusses its strengths and limitations

Since the advent of the world-wide web, academic researchers have constructed web pages to present a view of themselves, their work, their associations and their interests. This novel form of self-presentation has drawn a lot of attention over the past few years, prompting not only psychologists, but also social analysts, educators and software developers, to reflect on the ways in which technology pervades our self-presentations. Personal home pages are not, however, the only way in which scientists present themselves through technology construction and use—nor even the primary way. In this paper, we examine the technologies that oceanographers use to manage professional identity within their sociotechnical networks.

We frequently think of university scientists as inventors of new technologies, which are transferred from the university to industry organizations for innovation and diffusion. Because such processes are communication and information intensive, there are high expectations that use of information and communication technologies (ICTs) can facilitate technology transfers and subsequent economic development. However, communication processes that foster scientific discovery and knowledge transfer are embedded in social networks; if ICT use influences technology transfer, it is likely to be through these networks. At the same time, ICTs will be shaped through their use in these social networks. We suggest a socio-technical perspective is best suited to study these reciprocal influences. In this paper, we outline a program of research to examine socio-technical networks in scientific academia/industry collaborations. We begin by reviewing key findings and projections about use of ICTs in know...

Introduction During the previous century, knowledge dissemination by means of scholarly publications has developed into a sophisticated communication system in which commercial publishers play an important role. This system is now being transformed by digitisation and the use of the network, i.e. by changes in what nowadays is referred to as the information infrastructure. These changes must inevitably lead to new models for scholarly communication itself. But who is responsible for the quality of the system as a whole, and who is in control of the migration towards new communication models? The answer is: nobody - yet. In this paper we shall argue that one of the main characteristics of the new dissemination of knowledge will be a shift from functionally distributed responsibilities to a more integral responsibility held by the academic community. We shall also look at the consequences this might have for other actors involved in scholarly communication, and argue that these

the conflict between

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