Nachwuchsforschergruppe "Wissenschaft und Internet"

Focus: Theory and practice of citing and referencing in Web 2.0

Main research questions:

To what extent does the use of citations and references differ in established as well as in new forms of scientific communication?

How does this affect the evaluation of science?

First Results: Publications & presentations from this research project

• Dröge, E., Maghferat, P., Puschmann, C., Verbina, J., & Weller, K. (2011). Konferenz-Tweets. Ein Ansatz zur Analyse der Twitter-Kommunikation bei wisseschaftlichen Konferenzen [Conference tweets: An approach for analyzing Twitter conversations at scientific conferences]. In Joachim Griesbaum, Thomas Mandl, Christa Womser-Hacker (Eds.), Information und Wissen: global, sozial und frei? Proceedings des 12. Internationalen Symposiums für Informationswissenchaft (pp. 98-110). Boizenburg: VWH.
• Haustein, S., Peters, I., & Terliesner, J. (2011, to appear). Informetric Evaluation of Reader Perception by Using Tags from Social Bookmarking Systems. In Poster-Proceedings of the 13th International Society of Scientometrics and Informetrics Conference, Durban, South Africa.
• Peters, I., Haustein, S., & Terliesner, J. (2011). Crowdsourcing Article Evaluation. In Proceedings of the Poster Session at the Web Science Conference 2011, Koblenz, Germany.
• Puschmann, C., Weller, K., & Dröge, E. (2011). Studying Twitter conversations as (dynamic) graphs: visualization and structural comparison. Poster presentation at the General Online Research (GOR 11), Düsseldorf, Germany.
• Weller, K., Dröge, E., & Puschmann, C. (2011). Citation Analysis in Twitter: Approaches for Defining and Measuring Information Flows within Tweets during Scientific Conferences. In Matthew Rowe, Milan Stankovic, Aba-Sah Dadzie, & Mariann Hardey (Eds.), Making Sense of Microposts (#MSM2011), Workshop at Extended Semantic Web Conference (ESWC 2011), Crete, Greece (pp. 1-12). CEUR Workshop Proceedings Vol. 718.
• Weller, K., Puschmann, C. (2011). Twitter for Scientific Communication: How Can Citations/References be Identified and Measured? In: Proceedings of the Poster Session at the Web Science Conference 2011, Koblenz, Germany. [View the poster on slideshare]

Additional information

Project description / introduction

The fundamental force behind the Internet is references or links which connect the websites and thus build the World Wide Web. The physical and scientific world relies on footnotes, cross references and bibliographic references to weave the web around publications (Smith, 2004). References and links are the keys for finding relevant information worth further reading in both search engines and bibliographies. But references also carry additional information and may be analysed in order to evaluate the relevance of a particular publication. Thus, references are considered in two ways: on the one hand it is counted how many citations a publication gains (the more citations the more important the publication) and on the other hand the completeness of the references of the publication is investigated (the more references the more precise the publication).

Publications and citations as objects in traditional print-contexts are discussed e.g. by Cronin (1984), in Web 2.0 and the Social Web e.g. by Gray et al. (2008). The Web 2.0 has created lots of new forms of references besides links. To name just a few examples: The microblogging service Twitter allows users to retweet other users’ tweets and thus to cite them (Boyd, Golder, & Lotan, 2010), bloggers are automatically informed via trackbacks or pingbacks that other blogs cite them (Kim & SangKi, 2008).

Main research questions:

From an information science perspective, the main challenge in this research field is to judge the significance of novel forms of online communication in comparison to traditional scientific communication structures. This project aims at gaining first insights into the following questions:

1. What is role of citations in Web 2.0? Which forms of citations and references do appear (e.g. trackbacks, pingbacks, retweets)? Can standards be proposed for these novel citations?

2. How can these novel forms of citations be integrated to informetrics/scientometrics? Are they usable for judging the relevance of publications/websites/authors/journals? Which metrics can be applied?

3. Is the citation process varying for different forms of publications? Do the format and accessibility of a medium affect the citation behavior?

References

• Boyd, D., Golder, S., & Lotan, G. (2010). Tweet, tweet, retweet: Conversational aspects of retweeting on Twitter. Vortrag auf der HICSS-42, Kauai, HI.
• Cronin, B. (1984). The citation process. The role and significance of citations in scientific communication. London: Taylor Graham.
• Gray, K., Thompson, C., Clerehan, R., Sheard, J., & Hamilton, M. (2008). Web 2.0 authorship: Issues of referencing and citation for academic integrity. Internet and Higher Education, (11), 2-118.
• Kim, G., & SangKi, H. S. (2008). A study of online (digital) reputation in blogosphere based on relationship and activity. Proceedings of the International Conference on Cyberworlds, S.173-179.
• Smith, A. G. (2004). Web Links as Analogues of Citations. Information Research, 9(4).

Verantwortlich: Isabella Peters, Katrin Weller