Does the General Public Share Research on Twitter? A Case Study on the Online Conversation about the Search for a Nuclear Repository in Germany

The search for a final nuclear repository in Germany poses a societal and political issue of high national medial presence and controversy. The German Repository Site Selection Act demands the search to be a “participatory, science-based [...] process”. Also, the repository search combines numerous scientific aspects (e. g., geological analyses, technical requirements) with broad societal implications. For these reasons it constitutes a promising background to analyze the general public’s habits regarding referencing research on Twitter. We collected tweets associated with the conversation around the German nuclear repository search based on keywords. Subsamples of the resulting tweet set are coded regarding sending users’ professional roles and types of hyperlinked content. We found the most vocal group participating in the conversation to be activists and initiatives, while journalists constituted the follower-wise most influential accounts in the sample. Regarding references to scientific content, we found only very few cases of direct links to scholarly publications; however, several kinds of indirect references to academic findings could be identified, e. g., links to paraphrases of studies in news articles or blog posts. Our results indicate participation from a fairly diverse set of users in the observed communication around the German repository search; exchanges of research findings however appear to have happened rarely and been limited to very few particular studies. The findings also illustrate a central problem regarding the expressive power of socialmedia-based altmetrics, namely that a large share of signals indicating a scholar-y work’s influence will not be found by searching for explicit identifiers

An Assessment of Impact Metrics’ Potential as Research Indicators Based on Their Perception, Usage, and Dependencies from External Science Communication

The demand for practicable methods for quantitative assessments of scientific products’ relevance has risen considerably over the past decades. As a consequence, research and commercial providers of scholarly data developed a wide variety of impact indicators, ranging from citation-based to so-called altmetrics. This highly heterogeneous family of indicators is based on the principle of measuring interactions with scientific publications that are observable online, and covers for instance mentions of publications in social and journalistic media, in literature management software, or in policy documents. The various metrics' theoretical validity as impact indicators is debated constantly, as questions regarding what it is that different metrics measure or express in many facets remain unanswered. This thesis makes two central contributions towards answering these questions. Its first part systematically assesses the status quo of various metrics’ perception and usage by researchers. This assessment serves to determine the significance of metrics in academic daily routines, as well as to identify relevant perceived problems concerning their usage. The challenges identified this way are in later sections of the thesis opposed with concrete measures to be taken during the development of future research metrics and their infrastructure to effectively solve common criticisms regarding current metrics and their use. Proceeding from the first part’s user studies, this thesis’ second part examines the relationship between research metrics and external science communication. It this way addresses a wide research gap with considerable potential implications for metrics’ validity as indicators for quality - the question to which degree these metrics are merely the result of promotion, which respective research publications receive

Study on open science: The general state of the play in Open Science principles and practices at European life sciences institutes

Nowadays, open science is a hot topic on all levels and also is one of the priorities of the European Research Area. Components that are commonly associated with open science are open access, open data, open methodology, open source, open peer review, open science policies and citizen science. Open science may a great potential to connect and influence the practices of researchers, funding institutions and the public. In this paper, we evaluate the level of openness based on public surveys at four European life sciences institute

Information between Data and Knowledge: Information Science and its Neighbors from Data Science to Digital Humanities

Digital humanities as well as data science as neighboring fields pose new challenges and opportunities for information science. The recent focus on data in the context of big data and deep learning brings along new tasks for information scientist for example in research data management. At the same time, information behavior changes in the light of the increasing digital availability of information in academia as well as in everyday life. In this volume, contributions from various fields like information behavior and information literacy, information retrieval, digital humanities, knowledge representation, emerging technologies, and information infrastructure showcase the development of information science research in recent years. Topics as diverse as social media analytics, fake news on Facebook, collaborative search practices, open educational resources or recent developments in research data management are some of the highlights of this volume. For more than 30 years, the International Symposium of Information Science has been the venue for bringing together information scientists from the German speaking countries. In addition to the regular scientific contributions, six of the best competitors for the prize for the best information science master thesis present their work