New media &digital research literacies

Professor Paul Mahargpaulmaharg.com/slides

preview1. Digital research literacies2. Scholarly peer networks: SSRN, Academia, ResearchGate,

Google Scholar, LinkedIn, CarbonMade, etc3. Publishing platforms: blogs, Slideshare, Twitter, Buzzfeed4. Bibliometrics > altmetrics5. Some research…6. Some personal conclusions

why should we care about this?

What scandalized the serious scholar Erasmus (as it fascinated Durer) was the fact that, not much more than half a century after the first appearance of the printed book, demand had turned it into a product beyond the control of the scholars and specialists. The book had taken over as the transmitter of European written culture, before scholars and educators had had time to come to terms with its power and influence.

(Jardine, 1996, p. 228)

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1. Digital research literacies

digital mediaPros Cons

Wide dissemination, remains at a more or less fixed place for readers to return & download, etc

Can be time-consuming & addictive; are you getting to the people you want to read your stuff?

Gathering, sorting, archiving of digital information very useful

Apps disappear or go corporate

Builds academic profile through altmetrics Can encourage narcissism & grandiosity if used as vanity projects

Facilitates the Open – open access, open education, OE resources

Privacy can be an issue (cf Facebook)

Supports knowledge as a public good Do we want that? Should knowledge always be public?

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deeper issues1. What’s digital?

Specific devices, networks, assemblages? Technical, educational, research affordances, modes of text and search, specific skills, competences, practices, environments?

2. How does digital alter social?Eg distributed communities, socio-material understandings, means of production & modes of use

3. How does digital (+ social) alter literacies?Eg artefacts and practices, formal and informal contexts of research, visual artefacts, digital curation.

4. How does digital encourage metricization of our working lives, and what can we do about it?

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transforming features of digital…• Replicability• Mutability• Connectivity• Instantaneity (& the ‘nearly now’)• Portability• Identity

(Jones 2013, 162-65)

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so surely our staff pages…?• Almost no social sharing• Static pages• No reference to academic tools or modes of

communication• Pretty much social media-free• Occasionally useful for linking to repositories to view

‘versions of record’. Or email addresses…

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and now impact comes over the horizonIn REF2014, it meant evidencing a narrative that was:

Instrumental• Influencing the development of policy practice or service provision• Shaping behaviour• Altering legislation

Conceptual• Contributing to our understanding of the above • Reframing debates

Capacity-building• Technical/professional skills development

Cultural change• Increased willingness to engage in knowledge exchange activities – by

individuals, and/or institutions• Changed mindsets

Enduring connectivity• Establishment of enduring academic / non-academic relationships –

indicator of potential future achievements or impacts

2. Scholarly peer networks

scholarly peer networks• SSRN• Google Scholar: http://bit.ly/1umHCmP• Academia: bit.ly/1oaK9hj• ResearchGate: http://bit.ly/10k3dyE• LinkedIn: http://linkd.in/1DSQvnn• Carbonmade: http://bit.ly/1GfMZY4• Zotero• Evernote

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publishing platforms: blogging

http://paulmaharg.com17.3.2005 > present. Used for:• Dissemination of ideas & research• Construction yard for sections of papers & articles• Sky-writing (Steven Harnard)• Identity formation• Connecting on Blawg

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publishing platforms: blogging2/3

publishing platforms: slidedecks & Twitter

http://slideshare.net/paulmahargUsed for:• Dissemination of slidedecks• Set alerts for others’ presentations• Re Twitter, use third-party apps & aggregators, eg

TweetDeck to manage the dataflow

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publishing platforms: slidedecks & Twitter2/3

publishing platforms: slidedecks & Twitter2/3

including pre- / post-conference chat2/3

some slideshare stats2/3

publishing platforms: Buzzfeed(surely not Buzzfeed?)2/3

Yes, Buzzfeed

http://bit.ly/1JFKYp0

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4. Bibliometrics > altmetrics

altmetrics…?

See altmetrics.org: ‘the creation and study of new metrics based on the Social Web for analyzing and informing scholarship’

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existing impact: how we are judged

Existing filters:• Peer-review• Citation counting

eg h-index• Journal Impact Factor (JIF)

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existing impact: how we are judged• … of a journal: A measure of the average number of citations

to articles published in science & social science journals in a 3-year period (Eugene Garfield, ISI). Calculated annually for the journals indexed in Thomson Reuters Journal Citation Reports.

• Calculation: number of times articles were cited in indexed journals divided by number of items published in journals.

• Pressure on authors to enter high-ranked journals• Pressure on journals to stay high-ranked

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existing impact: how we are judged…

BUT… • JIF is easily gamed:

http://bit.ly/1uYDPgE• And gives inaccurate views of

journal quality: http://bit.ly/1Ddo8Be

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… hence altmetrics‘With altmetrics, we can crowdsource peer-review. Instead of waiting months for two opinions, an article’s impact might be assessed by thousands of conversations and bookmarks in a week. In the short term, this is likely to supplement traditional peer-review, perhaps augmenting rapid review in journals like PLoS ONE, BMC Research Notes or BMJ Open. In the future, greater participation and better systems for identifying expert contributors may allow peer review to be performed entirely from altmetrics.Unlike the JIF, altmetrics reflect the impact of the article itself, not its venue. Unlike citation metrics, altmetrics will track impact outside the academy, impact of influential but uncited work, and impact from sources that aren’t peer-reviewed. Some have suggested altmetrics would be too easy to game; we argue the opposite.’

altmetrics: a manifesto -- http://bit.ly/1tldeJA

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what might altmetrics look like?

Altmetrics: a manifesto – http://bit.ly/1tldeJA

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ANU page – ‘Increasing your research impact’

http://libguides.anu.edu.au/content.php?pid=499217&sid=4105636

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ResearchGate stats for week ending Jul 12 2015 Publication Publication Citations Views downloads views

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Citation analysis – are the tools perfect for the job?

• Web of Science should not be used alone for locating citations to an author or title. • Scopus and Google Scholar can help identify a considerable number of

valuable citations not found in Web of Science; • Scopus and Google Scholar can help identify a considerable number of

citations in document types not covered by ISI citation databases; • Scopus and Google Scholar may assist in providing a more comprehensive

picture of the extent of international and interdisciplinary nature of scholarly communication of and among researchers; and

• Google Scholar has several technical problems that users should be aware of in order to accurately and effectively locate citations.

• The selection of the database(s) for locating citation is field-dependent.

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…so crowdsourcing via the Open movement, in data & scholarship, might be the answer?

Eg • Datacite• DASH (Harvard)• Caselaw• Ravel Law

Further reading:http://bit.ly/1LgPtbo

• ANU Digital Collections

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and there are tools to measure institutions 4

learning more about biblio>alt

Quantifying and Analysing Scholarly Communications on the Web, June ‘15http://ascw.know-center.tugraz.at/

http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/hefcemetrics-review/

The Metric Tide argues for metrics with …• Robustness: basing metrics on the best possible data in terms of accuracy

and scope; • Humility: recognising that quantitative evaluation should support – but

not supplant – qualitative, expert assessment; • Transparency: keeping data collection and analytical processes open and

transparent, so that those being evaluated can test and verify the results; • Diversity: accounting for variation by field, and using a variety of indicators

to support diversity across the research system; • Reflexivity: recognising systemic and potential effects of indicators and

updating them in response. www.hefce.ac.uk/rsrch/metrics

5. Some research findings

So why digital research literacy? For all these reasons & more…

• Quantify and document research impact• Justify future requests for funding• Quantify return on research investment• Discover how research findings are being used• Identify similar research projects• Identify possible collaborators• Determine if research findings are duplicated, confirmed, corrected, improved or repudiated• Determine if research findings were extended• Confirm that research findings were properly attributed/credited• Demonstrate that research findings are resulting in meaningful outcomes• Discover community benefit as a result of research findings• Progress reports to funders etc• Promotion dossiers

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effect of hierarchy?• ‘Social network analysis revealed that discipline was influential in defining

community structure, while academic seniority was linked to the position of nodes within the network.’

• ‘The survey revealed a contradiction between academics use of the sites and their position within the networks the sites foster. Junior academics were found to be more active users of the sites, agreeing to a greater extent with the perceived benefits, yet having fewer connections and occupying a more peripheral position in the network.’

Jordan (2014)

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effect on open access to knowledge?• ‘Like Apple, Nature now

intends to sell its “products”as a branded empire.’

• ‘Increasingly those who control the means of communication influence the way we work, think and act.ReadCube destroys our freedom. So maybe we'll shortly return to the browser-wars "this paper only viewable on Read-Cube". If readers are brainwashed into compliance by technology restrictions our future is grim.’

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http://bit.ly/1KzKBzQ

• ‘Using data from the Teaching, Research, and International Policy project on peer-reviewed publications between 1980 and 2006, we show that women are systematically cited less than men after controlling for a large number of variables including year of publication, venue of publication, substantive focus, theoretical perspective, methodology, tenure status, and institutional affiliation.’

• ‘Articles authored by women are systematically less central than articles authored by men, all else equal. This is likely because (1) women tend to cite themselves less than men, and (2) men (who make up a disproportionate share of IR scholars) tend to cite men more than women. This is the first study in political science to reveal significant gender differences in citation patterns and is especially meaningful because citation counts are increasingly used as a key measure of research's quality and impact.’ Maliniak et al 2013

effects re gender differences in citation?5

6. Some conclusions

what can ANU Law researchers do?• Acknowledge the ceaseless emergence of technology, and engage with it

as widely as our time & energy allows • Base our practices on community and collaboration: share what we know,

learn from each other• Be Open in teaching and research: support the Open movement• Read & engage with the research eg on Impact Blog• Use it: use new media to shape our research and our narratives of social

engagement and impact – before someone else shapes it for us

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referencesBIALL Legal Information Literacy Statement, http://www.biall.org.uk/data/files/BIALL_Legal_Information_Literacy_Statement_July_2012.pdfCheston, C.C., Flickinger, T.E., Chisholm, M.S. (2013). Social media use in medical education: A systematic review, Academic Medicine. 88, 6, 893-901.Holmes, K. (2014). Going beyond bibliometric and altmetric counts to understand impact. http://libraryconnect.elsevier.com/articles/2014-05/going-beyond-bibliometric-and-altmetric-counts-understand-impact#sthash.4stanFFN.dpufJardine, L. (1996). Worldly Goods: A New History of the Renaissance. Macmillan, London.Jones, C. (2013). The digital university: a concept in need of definition. In R. Goodfellow, M.R.Lea, eds, Literacy in the Digital University. Critical Perspectives on Learning, Scholarship and Technology. SRHE, Routledge, London, 162-172.Jordan, K. (2014). Academics and their online networks: Exploring the role of academic social networking sites. Available at: http://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/4937/4159 Konkiel, S. (2014) Playing with altmetrics. http://theresearchwhisperer.wordpress.com/2014/10/21/altmetrics-services/#more-3175 Maliniak, D., Powers, R., Walter, B.F. (2013). The gender citation gap in International Relations. International Organization, 67, 4, 889-922. http://bit.ly/1yYFxym SCONUL Seven Pillars of Information Literacy (2011). The Core Model.http://www.sconul.ac.uk/sites/default/files/documents/coremodel.pdf Veletsianos, G. (2013). Open practices and identity: Evidence from researchers and educators’ social media participation. British Journal of Education Technology, 44, 4, 639-51.Yang, Kiduk and Meho, Lokman I. Citation Analysis: A Comparison of Google Scholar, Scopus, and Web of Science., 2006 . In 69th Annual Meeting of the American Society for Information Science and Technology (ASIST), Austin (US), 3-8 November 2006. [Conference paper], http://eprints.rclis.org/8605/

Email:paul.maharg@anu.edu.auWeb: paulmaharg.comSlides: paulmaharg.com/slides