INFO 532: Scholarly communication

Chapter Five: Social Network Analysis

Instructor:
DR. LAWRENCE ABRAHAM GOJEH
(ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR)
Chapter Five: Social Network Analysis
• Sociology of Science.
• Visualization
– Citation Maps,
– Nodes,
– Graphs, and
– Networks.
• Trends and New Technologies in SNA
– E-prints,
– creative commons,
– collaboratories,
– Webmetrics, and
– E-metrics.
– The Internet
 Chapter Objectives
• Discuss Social Network Analysis
• Explain the Sociology of Science
• Discuss Visualization (Citation Maps, Nodes, Graphs, &
Networks) and the Citation Network.
• Explain the Trends and New Technologies in Social Network
Analysis (eprints, creative commons, collaboratories,
webmetrics and internet).
 Social Network
• Social network was coined by John Barnes in 1954.
• It is defined as a social structure made up of individuals or
organizations called "nodes", which are tied (connected) by one or
more specific types of actors/interdependency, such as:
 friendship,
 kinship,
 common interest,
 financial exchange,
 organizations,
 institutions,
 communities,
 groups,
 families etc.
• Actors can be individual people, objects or events as far as certain
relations hold them all together.
 Social Network (cont.)
• Actors can also be aggregate units such as:
• 1. The very idea of the social network approach is that relations or
interactions between actors are the building blocks or the key factors
that sustain and define the network.
• 2. Typically interactions between actors result from:
– exchange of resources,
• either material or informational, such as:
– goods,
– money,
– information,
– services,
– social or emotional support,
 Social Network (cont.)
– trust,
– influence etc.
• 3. Each kind of resource exchange is considered a social network
relation and actors maintaining the relation are said to maintain a tie.
• The strength of a tie may range from:
– weak to strong depending on the quantity, or
– quality and frequency of the exchanges between actors.
• Patterns of who is tied to whom reveal the structure of the
underlying network:
– they show how resources flow among actors; and
– how actors are interconnected in the network.
•
 Social Network (cont.)
• Examples of social networks
• A few very well known examples of social network analysis are:
– exchange of job information among acquaintances, where weak
ties are quite operationally strong for the diffusion of such
information.
– the urban poor in isolated Black ghettoes lack connections with
sources of work.
– the dependency of social capital on ‘structural holes’ (which are
particular kinds of network positioning in which a focal actor is
connected to other actors; which themselves are not connected
with one another); which is not a direct attribute of actors but
rather of their ability to sustain flexible configurations within a
network.
 Social Network (cont.)
– now, computer networks in general and in particular the Internet
are clearly social networks .
• In these social networks, actors may be:
– human, such as:
• users,
• communicants,
• information producers and consumers,
• citizens,
• public or market organizations etc., or
– non-human, such as:
• computer machines,
• information databases,
 Social Network (cont.)
• (hyper-) documents,
• multimedia resources, etc.
• Relations among the human Internet actors refer to:
– informative and communicative uses,
– access,
– provision,
– procurement,
– commerce,
– work,
– education etc.
• Although human actors are always beneath the non-human ones,
typical relations among the latter consist of:
– information (data) flows,
 Social Network (cont.)
– traffic,
– exchanges of e-mails and postings in web pages,
– links,
– connections,
– network topologies etc.
 Social network analysis
• Social Network Analysis (SNA) is a body of methods developed for
analyzing social networks.
• It has its origins in sociology and mathematics “graph theory” but it is
now being used across a wide range of other disciplines.
• Social network analysis: refers to a research approach developed
primarily in sociology, social psychology and communication science.
• It focuses on patterns of relations among people, and among groups
such as organizations and states.
• As computer networks such as the Web connect people and
organizations, they can host social networks.
• Social network analysis approach address commonly five basic issues:
– cohesion,
– structural equivalence,
 Social Network Analysis (cont.)
– prominence,
– Range, and
– brokerage.
• 1. Cohesion (which is a relational property):
– refers to the grouping of actors because of the strength of their
relationships with one another.
– Cohesive groups of actors form clusters or cliques depending on
whether they are highly or fully interconnected, respectively.
– A measure of cohesion is the network density, which is calculated
as the ratio of the number of actually occurring links (relations) to
the number of all possible links.
– A relevant concept is that of centralization, measuring the extent
to which a set of actors are organized around a central one
 Social Network Analysis (cont.)
• 2. Structural equivalence (which is a positional property):
– Identifies actors who have similar patterns of relations with
others, even if such actors may not have direct relations with each
other.
– An actor’s pattern of relations constitutes a role.
– Thus, actors playing similar roles occupy similar (or equivalent)
structural or status positions.
– A technique for assessing structural equivalence is known as block
modelling.
– In this technique, one first calculates correlations between all
pairs of actors and then reorders the actors into sets on the basis
of the correlation values in such a way that pairs of actors that are
highly correlated (and, therefore, most structurally equivalent)
should appear together in the same group (or block).
 Social Network Analysis (cont.)
• 3. Prominence:
– Reflects the hierarchical status of an actor.
– It can be measured by assessing the centrality of an actor in a
network, which is derived by measuring the actor’s connections in
the network, i.e., its degree. (This differs from the previously
mentioned centralization, which measures the configuration of
the network as a whole.)
– The actor with the highest degree (i.e., the most relationships
with other actors) is the most central.
– Another measure of an actor’s prominence is global centrality (or
closeness) and it is derived by measuring the distance between
this actor and any other actor, which is defined as the number of
connections in the shortest path between the actors.
 Social Network Analysis (cont.)
– The actor with the lowest sum of distances to all other
actors is the most globally central actor.
• 4. Range:
– Refers to a combination of network size and
heterogeneity that jointly increases the ability of actors
to have access to a variety of resources (social support,
social capital).
– The biggest a network is, the more information an actor
will have access to and the more complex the accessed
information will be.
– Moreover, heterogeneous networks may provide a
greater variety of social support.
 Social Network Analysis (cont.)
• 5. Brokerage:
– An activity that puts interested actors in touch with one
another so that they might strike a deal.
– It involves at least three actors with the intermediary relegating
transactions between the others.
– In this case, there are five ideal-typical roles of brokers:
• liaison,
• representative,
• gatekeeper,
• Itinerant, and
• coordinator.
Social Network Analysis (cont.)
– Brokerage can be measured by betweenness, the extent
to which an actor is located between others in the
network.
– Where opportunities of brokerage exist but have not been
exploited yet, there is a ‘structural hole,’ in the
terminology coined.
– However, brokerage indicates not only opportunities to
further exploit the network potentialities but also points of
possible resistance by those currently playing the
gatekeeper’s role who have the power to control and filter
imported or exported information.
 Benefits of SNA
1. Identifies the individuals, teams, and units who play central roles.
2. Determine information breakdowns bottlenecks, structural holes, as
well as isolated individuals, teams, and units.
3. Make out opportunities to accelerate knowledge flows across
functional and organizational boundaries.
4. Strengthen the efficiency and effectiveness of existing, formal
communication channels.
5. Raise awareness of and reflection on the importance of informal
networks and ways to enhance their organizational performance.
6. Leverage peer support.
7. Improve innovation and learning.
8. Refine strategies.
 Problems with Network Analysis
i. The field of network analysis is normally criticized for being too
much methodological and too little theoretical.
ii. Critics say that there are few truly network theories of substantive
phenomena and critics also say 'that's not really a network theory'.
iii. Theories say that psychological phenomena tend to have a lot of
psychological content.
iv. Theories that account for sociological phenomena have sociological
independent variables.
v. Only theories that explain network phenomena tend to have a lot of
network content.
vi. A real problem with network analysis in the past has been the
inability to test hypotheses statistically, because the data are by
their very nature auto correlated, violating assumptions of
independence (random sampling) built-in to most classical statistical
tests.
 Problems with Network…(cont.)
vii. With the advent of permutation tests, this is much less
of problem now.
viii. A continuing problem is the lack of sufficient computing
resources to handle large databases.
ix. It is often a problem to bound a social network.
x. If we are looking at needle-sharing among drug users, we
can artificially bound the network at some arbitrary
boundary, such as city or neighborhood, but this distorts
the data.
xi. Yet we cannot let the network get too large because we
cannot process the data….
 Sociology of science
• Sociology of science is concerned with the social
explanation of the development of scientific knowledge, in
which factors such as the organization and social interests
of scientists are used to explain scientific changes.
• Barabasi et al. studied the collaboration networks in
mathematics and neuro-science of an 8-year period (1991-
1998) to understand the topological and dynamical laws
governing complex networks.
• They viewed the collaboration network as a prototype of
evolving works, as it expands by the addition of new nodes
(authors) and new links (papers co-authored).
 Sociology of science (cont.)
• The results obtained indicated that the network is scale-
free and that its evolution is governed by preferential
attachment.
• Moreover, authors concluded that most quantities used to
characterize the network are time dependent.
• For example, the average degree (network’s
interconnectedness) increases in time.
• Furthermore, the study showed that the node separation
decreases over time, however this trend is believed to be
offered by incomplete database and it can be opposite in
the full system.
 Visualizations
• Visualizations have played an important role in generating new
insights in social network analysis.
• Visualizing social networks is more than simply creating intriguing
pictures, it is about generating learning situations:
– “images of social networks have provided investigators with new
insights about network structure and have helped them
communicate those insights to others”.
• Such network images are created mainly in two ways:
– the first one is by drawing graphs made up of nodes and
connecting lines.
– The second way is to devise a matrix where rows and columns
stand for people and the numbers in each cell stand for the social
connections between the people.
• In practice, however, most social network applications have focused
on the graph representation.
 Visualizations (cont.)

Map of a sample network showing nodes and directed edges

 Visualizations (cont.)
• At its most basic level, a network consists of two variables—nodes
and edges.
• Nodes represent the individual members of a group, and edges
represent the presence of a relationship between two nodes.
• In a friendship network, for example, nodes represent people and
edges represent the presence of a friendship between those two
people.
• Consider the web: Nodes represent websites and edges represent the
presence of hyperlinks from one website to another.
• Other networks can be as varied as actors co-starring in movies,
electrical stations connected by power lines, and protein reactions
within cells.
 Visualizations (cont.)
• In more complex and representative networks, both nodes
and edges can have specific characteristics associated with
them.
• Depending on the network, both nodes and edges can have
numerical values, belong to certain categories, or be of
different types.
• Edges can also be either directed or undirected.
• Directed edges show the movement of something—
electrical current or a web surfer, for example—from one
node to another.
• Undirected edges simply indicate the presence of a
relationship between nodes.
 Visualizations (cont.)

Figure showing a co-author network generated from publications supported by NOAA’s

Office of Ocean Exploration and Research (OER).
 Visualizations (cont.)
• The image shows a co-author network generated
from publications supported by NOAA’s Office of
Ocean Exploration and Research (OER).
• Nodes are sized based on the number of
publications produced and coloured to highlight
clustering.
• Edges are sized and coloured based on the number
of collaborations between authors.
 Visualizations (cont.)

Figure showing a central section of a word co-occurrence network of words drawn from
the titles of OER-supported journal articles.
 Visualizations (cont.)
• The image is a central section of a word co-
occurrence network of words drawn from the titles
of OER-supported journal articles.
• Some words have been truncated.
• Nodes are sized by the number of times the word is
used and edges are sized and coloured based on the
number of publications in which they co-occur.
• Weaker edges have been removed for clarity.
• Nodes coloured blue are those that have been used
10 or more times in the publication set.
 Visualizations (cont.)

Figure showing a bibliographic coupling network of journal articles supported by OER.

 Visualizations (cont.)
• This image displays a bibliographic coupling
network of journal articles supported by OER.
• Nodes are sized based on the paper’s citation
count and colored to highlight clustering.
• Edges are sized and colored based on
bibliographic coupling strength.
• Weaker edges have been removed for clarity.
• Labels assigned to clusters based on manual
inspection of the papers in each cluster.
 Trends and new technologies
• There are new trends an technologies being used today in libraries
and information centers to help spread the word about the resources
and services they offer, using this innovative new social network
media forum.
• One important group of related trends may be observed to stem
directly from a shared recognition that technological developments
have redefined the scope both of the arenas in which scholars’
communication may take place and of the contexts in which
bibliometric techniques may usefully be applied.
• Prominent among these developments is the emergence of hypertext
technology in general, and the rapid rise to its currently dominant
state of the World-Wide Web in particular.
 Trends...(cont.)
• Hypertext and citation analysis
• Hypertext databases (of which the Web may be considered a vast,
distributed example) and citation networks have the same formal
structure.
• Each may be represented, at the same level of abstraction, as a
directed graph, consisting of (a) a set of nodes (i.e., “pages” or
documents), and (b) a set of ordered pairs of those nodes, each of
which may be considered as a directed, inter-nodal link (i.e., a
hyperlink or citation).
• Digital libraries and open archives
• We are currently witnessing the construction of large-scale, full-text,
distributed digital libraries of scholarly works (journal articles,
technical reports, etc.).
 Trends...(cont.)
• Here, inter-document citations are rendered in active (actionable)
form, so that readers may navigate among works, following citations
at will, and enjoying the facility immediately to retrieve and view
related material.
• Just as Web surfers have long been able to take advantage of the
hyperlinks created specifically for this purpose by the authors of Web
pages.
• Effective use of commercial databases of hyperlinked journal articles
is hampered by the “financial firewalls” that readers come up against
when attempting to navigate beyond the corpus to which they or
their institution subscribes.
• Access to research archives maintained by academic rather than
commercial institutions is typically more open.
 Trends...(cont.)
• Such digital libraries are the results of the first steps taken toward
realizing the dream of the ideal online resource for scholars and
scientists.
• All research papers in all fields, systematically interconnected,
effortlessly accessible and rationally navigable from any researcher’s
desk worldwide.
• The provision of free, open, discipline-based access to e-prints —
electronic pre-print and re-prints — is the response of many scholarly
communities to the tactics of the commercial journal publishers who
are perceived to profit unreasonably from scholarly work.
• The nature and extent of the benefits that will be enjoyed by
information seekers using open, hyperlinked e-print archives are
already becoming clear.
 Trends...(cont.)
• The facilities to conduct keyword searches of full, digitized texts, and
to navigate directly from one citing paper to another cited paper, will
be supplemented by the provision of citation-based retrieval
functionality.
• Documents in retrieval sets may further be ranked by citedness, by
their qualities as “hubs” or “authorities” or by other, more reader-
centered measures of popularity such as hit-rate or frequency of
download.
• Such new trends and social network technologies include:
– E-prints,
– creative commons,
– collaboratories,
– Webmetrics, and
– E-metrics.
– The Internet
 Trends...(cont.)
• E-print
• With the advent of arXiv and the World Wide Web,
scientific literature used the terms e-print and
preprint almost interchangeably.
• An e-print describes the general category of an
electronic manuscript.
• This term can be used for any work, which an
author makes electronically available.
• It may thus refer to a peer-reviewed paper, an
unpublished paper or a preprint
 Trends...(cont.)
• Preprints are:
• Papers that authors have submitted for journal
publication, but for which no publication decision
has been reached, or even papers electronically
posted for peer consideration and comment before
submission for publication.
• In fact, preprints can also be documents that have
not been submitted to any journal.
• The distinction between preprints from post prints
is simply emphasizing that “the former are
published before peer review, whereas the latter
are research papers after peer review.”
 Trends...(cont.)
• The term preprint could refer to a digital document
that has been submitted to a repository (e.g.
institutional repository) without peer review.
• In the form of individual papers, a preprint server
such as arXiv helps scientists to share their results
immediately with the community.
• Preprint servers are mainly hosted at universities
and professional institutions.
• Physics, astronomy, computer science,
mathematics, chemistry, and medicine are leading
research fields in preprint publication.
 Trends...(cont.)
• This stems from the long-existing preprint culture in
those fields.
• “When research is this expensive, there is simply no
room to do the same science twice.”
• To avoid double research publication of the same
outcomes, institutes printed their results as
preprints, and distributed those copies of papers
among researchers in this field.
• At the same time, they were sent to journals for
publication.
 Trends...(cont.)
• With preprints, researchers were able to share their
findings before they had been refereed.
• Since the publication process of scientific journals
was characterized by delays and inefficiency,
physicists did not hesitate to cite findings before the
journal article was published.
• The advent of faxes quickened the distribution of
preprints but was not capable of reducing the
workload.
 Trends...(cont.)
• The Internet was a true option to bypass the delay between
submitting a manuscript and its peer-reviewed publication.
• As soon as e-mail became available, authors rather
preferred to use this medium for sharing preprints than the
slow distribution via fax or mail.
• With the advent of the Web in 1989, the procedure was
simply to deposit the preprint and to advise interested
readers to its URL via e-mail or alerting lists.
• At present, preprints are common practice, but their role
varies among subject fields.
• Whereas some communities make extensive use of
preprints, other communities still rely on refereed articles.
 Trends...(cont.)
• Benefits of preprints
• 1. Preprints bridge the time gap between
submission and publication.
• 2. They can be circulated immediately among
scholars to make research quickly available and to
establish priority.
• 3. Preprints are used as an early warning system to
keep colleagues away from research that may take
several months to be published in a journal.
 Trends...(cont.)
• 4. In an era of accelerated communication, it is
important to make the work publicly available as
soon as the research results exist.
• 5. Preprints are also a way to reduce the likelihood
of avoidable parallel research because they help to
identify quickly any correlations.
• 6. Nevertheless, some authors are concerned that
the early distribution of results enables other
researchers to publish similar results in a journal.
 Trends...(cont.)
• 7. It may sound contradictory, but intellectual
property is established by open publications, as is
the case with preprints.
• 8. The easier the publication is accessible to the
public, the more it is protected from plagiarism.
• 9. Preprint archives have democratized the scholarly
communication process, because anyone with
access to the Internet can enter preprint literature.
• 10. An important benefit is that search engines can
lead Internet users easily to preprints.
 Trends...(cont.)
• 11. Furthermore, any researcher can submit papers and
participate actively in the progress of science.
• 12. With preprint servers, comments can be received from
a much wider community, and those comments can be
included in the refined formal journal article.
• 13. Undoubtedly, it is of high value for authors to receive
critical comments that stimulate their drive to research as
well as their outcomes.
• 14. Finally, preprint archives enable scholars to increase
their visibility and impact by self-archiving their papers.
• 15. If their results are open to the community, they can be
accessed, used, and cited.
 Trends...(cont.)
• Creative Commons
• The ideal of universal access to research, education,
and culture is made possible by the Internet, but
our legal and social systems sometimes operate in
conflict with the goals of broad public access.
• Copyright law was developed long before the
emergence of the Internet, and can make it hard to
legally perform actions we take for granted on the
network (i.e. copy, paste, edit source, and post to
the web).
 Trends...(cont.)
• The default setting of copyright law is that all of these
actions require explicit permission, granted in advance,
whether the user is an artist, teacher, scientist, librarian,
policymaker, or a member of the general public.
• But the Creative Commons (CC) licenses and tools forge a
balance inside the traditional “all rights reserved” setting
that copyright law creates.
• Creative Commons tools give everyone from individual
creators to large companies and institutions a simple,
standardized way to explicitly grant permission to certain
uses of their copyrighted works.
 Trends...(cont.)
• The CC licenses and tools and the users are a vast and
growing digital commons, a pool of content that can be
copied, distributed, edited, remixed, and built upon, all
within the boundaries of copyright law.
• CC licenses are customizable.
• Some examples include:
– CC-BY, which only requires that content be attributed
when reused;
– CC-BY-ND, which requires attribution, but does not allow
derivatives of your work to be produced;
– CC-BY-NC, which requires attribution, but does not allow
for any commercial uses of your work.
 Trends...(cont.)
• Choosing the right CC license for your research and
scholarly output is easy and can be done in just a few very
simple steps at the Creative Commons website.
• Creative Commons (CC) is a non-profit
organization headquartered in Mountain View, California,
United States devoted to expanding the range of
creative works available for others to build upon legally and
to share.
• The organization has released several copyright-
licenses known as Creative Commons licenses free of
charge to the public.
 Trends...(cont.)
• These licenses allow creators to communicate which rights
they reserve, and which rights they waive for the benefit of
recipients or other creators.
• Creative Commons licenses do not replace copyright, but
are based upon it.
• They replace individual negotiations for specific rights
between copyright owner (licensor) and licensee, which are
necessary under an "all rights reserved" copyright
management with a "some rights reserved" management
employing standardized licenses for re-use cases where no
commercial compensation is sought by the copyright
owner.
 Trends...(cont.)
• The result is an agile, low overhead and cost copyright
management regime, profiting both copyright owners and
licensees.
• The organization was founded in 2001 by Lawrence Lessig,
Hal Abelson, and Eric Eldred with support of the Center for
the Public Domain.
• The first article in a general interest publication about
Creative Commons, written by Hal Plotkin, was published in
February 2002.
• The first set of copyright licenses was released in December
2002.
 Trends...(cont.)
• In 2008, there were an estimated 130 million works licensed under
the various Creative Commons licenses.
• As of October 2011, Flickr alone hosts over 200 million Creative
Commons licensed photos.
• Creative Commons is governed by a board of directors and a technical
advisory board.
• Their licenses have been embraced by many as a way for creators to
take control of how they choose to share their copyrighted works.
• Creative Commons has been described as being at the forefront of
the copyleft movement, which seeks to support the building of a
richer public domain by providing an alternative to the automatic "all
rights reserved“ copyright, dubbed "some rights reserved.”
 Trends...(cont.)
• David Berry and Giles Moss have credited Creative
Commons with generating interest in the issue of
intellectual property and contributing to the re-thinking of
the role of the “commons” in the “information age”.
• Beyond that, Creative Commons has provided
"institutional, practical and legal support for individuals and
groups wishing to experiment and communicate with
culture more freely."
• Creative Commons attempts to counter what Lawrence
Lessig, founder of Creative Commons, considers to be a
dominant and increasingly restrictive permission culture.
 Trends...(cont.)
• Lessig describes this as "a culture in which creators
get to create only with the permission of the
powerful, or of creators from the past".
• Lessig maintains that modern culture is dominated
by traditional content distributors in order to
maintain and strengthen their monopolies on
cultural products such as popular music and
popular cinema, and that Creative Commons can
provide alternatives to these restrictions.
 Trends...(cont.)
• Collaboratories
• The term "collaboratory" (colaborate + laboratory)
is attributed to William Wulf, who envisioned the
potential impact of the information age on science,
creating a ". . . 'center without walls,' in which the
nation's researchers can perform their research
without regard to geographical location:
– interacting with colleagues, accessing instrumentation,
sharing data and computational resources, [and]
accessing information in digital libraries."
 Trends...(cont.)
• Other terms that are used almost interchangeably
with collaboratory are:
– "virtual laboratory," “laboratory without walls,” and
"collaboratorium."
• They all encompass the use of information and
communication systems to remove barriers of
geographic distance and time from research
collaborations, not just scientists working remotely,
but working together regardless of their location.
 Trends...(cont.)
• A major emphasis of collaboratories is natural, informal
work processes, going beyond text exchange and
presentation metaphors, to in-depth, collaborative work.
• Collaboratories have potential roles in all stages of the
scientific process, from:
– the initial planning and organization of a new project
idea and project team,
– to the design of the experiments and development of
software,
– to the execution of those experiments and simulations
and their analysis,
– to the preparation and dissemination of the results.
 Trends...(cont.)
• However, one does not simply deploy a
collaboratory like a desktop publishing program;
one builds a collaboratory with scientists,
information, and tools.
• The collaboratory tools required are varied and
challenging to develop, requiring both generic
capabilities like video conferencing and screen
sharing, and domain-specific capabilities to handle
the manipulation and display of data types
particular to each type of scientific work.
 Trends...(cont.)
• Integration is a major component of collaboratory
development, spanning groupware, legacy
modeling and analysis applications, instrument
software, files, and databases.
• Because of their unique requirements,
collaboratories are often leading-edge examples of
knitting together new distributed systems
technologies.
 Trends...(cont.)
• Webometrics
• The science of webometrics (also cybermetrics)
tries to measure the World Wide Web to get
knowledge about the number and types of
hyperlinks, structure of the World Wide Web and
usage patterns.
• Webometrics is defined as "the study of the
quantitative aspects of the construction and use of
information resources, structures and technologies
on the Web drawing on bibliometric and informetric
approaches."
 Trends...(cont.)
• The term webometrics was first coined by Almind
and Ingwersen (1997).
• In a way webometrics is a logical extension of
bibliometrics.
• Some things that fall into this category include:
– link analyses (which Google's Page Rank uses very
effectively),
– Web log analyses (how many hits there are on a
webpage and from what IP addresses),
– scholarly communication on the Web (who
communicates with whom, who visits whose website,
who links to whom), and many more examples.
 Trends...(cont.)
• There was a controversary as to whether Webometrics
belongs in Library and Information Science (LIS) or Social
Network Analyses, but LIS has now expanded enough to let
it gently fit in both places.
• There have been some really cool researchers involved with
Webometrics over the years.
• For further reading, see:
– Mike Thelwall, Liwen Vaughan, Lennart Björneborn:
Webometrics. In: ARIST 39, 2005 (preprint). Accessed
2004 December 22.
– Webometrics -
http://www.db.dk/lb/2003preprint_ARIST.doc
 Trends...(cont.)
– Wikipedia's entry for Webometrics -
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Webometrics
– Retrieved from
"http://www.gslis.org/wiki/Webometrics"
• The hope that web links could be used to provide similar
kinds of information to that extracted from traditional
journal citations has been a key reason in motivating much
Webometrics studies.
• Since 1996, journals and universities' web sites were
central point of most Webometrics research in order to
validate links as an important source of information for
scholarly communication.
 Trends...(cont.)
• Results of recent studies indicate that web
hyperlinks can be related to scholarly measures, but
no cause-effect relationship was claimed.
• It is believed that Web is important source of
information for quantitative studies in terms of
formal scholarly communications (such as,
electronic journals, preprints, academic web
spaces) as well as informal scholarly
communications (such as chat, email, discussion
groups).
 Trends...(cont.)
• E-metrics
• E-metrics could be defined as a new exploratory
study of a new subject for e-business to measure
their performance and success.
• Every company is actively seeking out new
innovations and approaches that create competitive
advantage.
• Those organizations at the forefront of metrics
development will consistently make better tactical
and strategic decisions, and consequently out-
innovate and out-manage the competition.
 Trends...(cont.)
• To keep up, companies at competitive advantage,
they require new metrics, which E-metrics will
calibrate their success through their measuring Web
site success capabilities.
• Indicators of e-commerce effectiveness are
necessary to reveal whether a firm’s Web efforts are
paying off and to provide answers to the following
questions:
– Are you attracting new people to your site?
– Is your site sticky.? Which regions in it are not?
 Trends...(cont.)
– What is the shape of your lead qualification funnel?
– How proficient is your conversion of browsers to buyers?
– What customer segments do you track?
– How do these segments differ?
– What makes them loyal?
– How do you measure loyalty?
– What attributes describe your best customers that can help you
target other prospects like them?
– How can profiling help you cross-sell and up-sell?
– What is your churn rate?
– What site behavior on your site indicates that a prospect is ready
to buy?
– What progression through sections of your site do you wish to
encourage?
– What is the optimal product assortment on a page?
 Trends...(cont.)
• Internet
• The advent of the Internet has given rise to many forms of online
sociality, including:
– e-mail,
– Usenet,
– instant messaging,
– blogging, and
– online dating services.
• In 2003, another form of online community acquired stunning
popularity: online social networking services.
• In addition to descriptive personal profiles, members of such
communities publicly articulate mutual “friendship” links with other
members, creating a browseable network of social relations.
 Trends...(cont.)
• The rise of the Internet and the digitization of information
led to a quantum leap in our communication culture.
• Although science has always been disseminated through
distinct means, the methods of dissemination changed
fundamentally in the past 20 years.
• Oral and written communication got intrinsically tied to
each other.
• Mobile devices such as computers and phones allow
communication at every time and place.
• The scholarly communication in a networked era enhanced
not only its openness but also its speed.
 Trends...(cont.)
• What we associate with accelerated communication today
are e-mails, blogs, Twitter, discussion groups, repositories,
and electronic journals.
• Electronic journals made it possible “to become much
more rapid, global and interactive”.
• Internet technologies enable to speed up the publication in
journals because they are capable of reducing the time
delays in the communication between authors, editors,
reviewers, publishers, and readers.
• Undoubtedly, natural sciences are far ahead of social
sciences when it comes to the implementation of
technologies that boost the speed of communication.
 Trends...(cont.)
• It is certain that the Internet increased the velocity of the publication
process and is likely to increase it in future.
• To which extent, depends not only on the discipline, but also on other
factors, such as the publication output, the need for rapid
communication, the peer review process, the mode of submission,
etc.
• For authors who are frustrated with long publication delays, the fact
that the Internet accelerates scholarly communication may sound
appeasing.
• It is obvious that acceleration in communication is essential when it
comes to studies in medicine, or chemistry. Moreover, in almost
every research discipline, accelerated communication can prevent
from doing double research, and consequently saves time and
money.