Disseminating research with web CV hyperlinks

This is an accepted manuscript of an article published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd in Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology on 03/07/2014, available online: https://doi.org/10.1002/asi.23070 The accepted version of the publication may differ from the final published version.Some curricula vitae (web CVs) of academics on the web, including homepages and publication lists, link to open‐access (OA) articles, resources, abstracts in publishers' websites, or academic discussions, helping to disseminate research. To assess how common such practices are and whether they vary by discipline, gender, and country, the authors conducted a large‐scale e‐mail survey of astronomy and astrophysics, public health, environmental engineering, and philosophy across 15 European countries and analyzed hyperlinks from web CVs of academics. About 60% of the 2,154 survey responses reported having a web CV or something similar, and there were differences between disciplines, genders, and countries. A follow‐up outlink analysis of 2,700 web CVs found that a third had at least one outlink to an OA target, typically a public eprint archive or an individual self‐archived file. This proportion was considerably higher in astronomy (48%) and philosophy (37%) than in environmental engineering (29%) and public health (21%). There were also differences in linking to publishers' websites, resources, and discussions. Perhaps most important, however, the amount of linking to OA publications seems to be much lower than allowed by publishers and journals, suggesting that many opportunities for disseminating full‐text research online are being missed, especially in disciplines without established repositories. Moreover, few academics seem to be exploiting their CVs to link to discussions, resources, or article abstracts, which seems to be another missed opportunity for publicizing research

GAUGING PUBLIC INTEREST FROM SERVER LOGS, SURVEYS AND INLINKS

As the World Wide Web (the Web) has turned into a full-fledged medium to disseminate news, it is very important for journalism and information science researchers to investigate how Web users access online news reports and how to interpret such usage patterns. This doctoral thesis collected and analyzed Web server log statistics, online surveys results, online reprints of the top 50 news reports, as well as external inlinks data of a leading comprehensive online newspaper (the People’s Daily Online) in China, one of the biggest Web/information markets in today’s world. The aim of the thesis was to explore various methods to gauge the public interest from a Webometrics perspective. A total of 129 days of Web server log statistics, including the top 50 Chinese and English news stories with the highest daily pageview numbers, the comments attracted by these news items and the emailed frequencies of the same stories were collected from October 2007 to September 2008. These top 50 news items’positions on the Chinese and English homepages and the top 50 queries submitted to the website search engine of the People’s Daily Online were also retrieved. Results of the two online surveys launched in March 2008 and March 2009 were collected after their respective closing dates. The external inlinks to the People’s Daily Online were retrieved by Yahoo! (Chinese and English versions), and the online reprints were retrieved by Google. Besides the general usage patterns identified from the top 50 news stories, this study, by conducting statistical tests on the data sets, also reveals the following findings. First, the editors’ choices and the readers’ favorites do not always match each other; thus content of news title is more important than its homepage position in attracting online visits. Second, the Chinese and English readers’ interests in the same events are different. Third, the pageview numbers and comments posted to the news items reflect the unfavorable attitudes of the Chinese people toward the United States and Japan, which might offer us a method to investigate the public interest in some other issues or nations after necessary modifications. More importantly, some publicly available data, such as the comments posted to the news stories and online survey results, further show that the pageview measure does reflect readers’ interests/needs truthfully, as proved by the strong correlations between the top news reports and relevant top queries. The external ininks to the news websites and the online reprints of the top news items help us examine readers\u27 interests from other perspectives, as well as establish online profiles of the news websites. Such publicly accessible information could be an alternative data source for researchers to study readers\u27 interests when the Web server log data are not available. This doctoral thesis not only shows the usefulness of Web server log statistics, survey results, and other publicly accessible data in studying Web user’s information needs, but also offers practical suggestions for online news sites to improve their contents and homepage designs. However, no single method can draw a complete picture of the online news readers’ interests. The above mentioned research methodologies should be employed together, in order to make more comprehensive conclusions. Future research is especially needed to investigate the continuously rapid growth of the “Mobile News Readers,” which poses both challenges and opportunities to the press industry in the 21st century

GAUGING PUBLIC INTEREST FROM SERVER LOGS, SURVEYS AND INLINKS A Multi-Method Approach to Analyze News Websites

As the World Wide Web (the Web) has turned into a full-fledged medium to disseminate news, it is very important for journalism and information science researchers to investigate how Web users access online news reports and how to interpret such usage patterns. This doctoral thesis collected and analyzed Web server log statistics, online surveys results, online reprints of the top 50 news reports, as well as external inlinks data of a leading comprehensive online newspaper (the People\u27s Daily Online) in China, one of the biggest Web/information markets in today\u27s world. The aim of the thesis was to explore various methods to gauge the public interest from a Webometrics perspective. A total of 129 days of Web server log statistics, including the top 50 Chinese and English news stories with the highest daily pageview numbers, the comments attracted by these news items and the emailed frequencies of the same stories were collected from October 2007 to September 2008. These top 50 news items’positions on the Chinese and English homepages and the top 50 queries submitted to the website search engine of the People’s Daily Online were also retrieved. Results of the two online surveys launched in March 2008 and March 2009 were collected after their respective closing dates. The external inlinks to the People’s Daily Online were retrieved by Yahoo! (Chinese and English versions), and the online reprints were retrieved by Google. Besides the general usage patterns identified from the top 50 news stories, this study, by conducting statistical tests on the data sets, also reveals the following findings. First, the editors’ choices and the readers’ favorites do not always match each other; thus content of news title is more important than its homepage position in attracting online visits. Second, the Chinese and English readers’ interests in the same events are different. Third, the pageview numbers and comments posted to the news items reflect the unfavorable attitudes of the Chinese people toward the United States and Japan, which might offer us a method to investigate the public interest in some other issues or nations after necessary modifications. More importantly, some publicly available data, such as the comments posted to the news stories and online survey results, further show that the pageview measure does reflect readers’ interests/needs truthfully, as proved by the strong correlations between the top news reports and relevant top queries. The external ininks to the news websites and the online reprints of the top news items help us examine readers\u27 interests from other perspectives, as well as establish online profiles of the news websites. Such publicly accessible information could be an alternative data source for researchers to study readers\u27 interests when the Web server log data are not available. This doctoral thesis not only shows the usefulness of Web server log statistics, survey results, and other publicly accessible data in studying Web user’s information needs, but also offers practical suggestions for online news sites to improve their contents and homepage designs. However, no single method can draw a complete picture of the online news readers’ interests. The above mentioned research methodologies should be employed together, in order to make more comprehensive conclusions. Future research is especially needed to investigate the continuously rapid growth of the “Mobile News Readers,” which poses both challenges and opportunities to the press industry in the 21st century

Web manifestations of knowledge-based innovation systems in the UK

Innovation is widely recognised as essential to the modern economy. The term knowledgebased innovation system has been used to refer to innovation systems which recognise the importance of an economy’s knowledge base and the efficient interactions between important actors from the different sectors of society. Such interactions are thought to enable greater innovation by the system as a whole. Whilst it may not be possible to fully understand all the complex relationships involved within knowledge-based innovation systems, within the field of informetrics bibliometric methodologies have emerged that allows us to analyse some of the relationships that contribute to the innovation process. However, due to the limitations in traditional bibliometric sources it is important to investigate new potential sources of information. The web is one such source. This thesis documents an investigation into the potential of the web to provide information about knowledge-based innovation systems in the United Kingdom. Within this thesis the link analysis methodologies that have previously been successfully applied to investigations of the academic community (Thelwall, 2004a) are applied to organisations from different sections of society to determine whether link analysis of the web can provide a new source of information about knowledge-based innovation systems in the UK. This study makes the case that data may be collected ethically to provide information about the interconnections between web sites of various different sizes and from within different sectors of society, that there are significant differences in the linking practices of web sites within different sectors, and that reciprocal links provide a better indication of collaboration than uni-directional web links. Most importantly the study shows that the web provides new information about the relationships between organisations, rather than just a repetition of the same information from an alternative source. Whilst the study has shown that there is a lot of potential for the web as a source of information on knowledge-based innovation systems, the same richness that makes it such a potentially useful source makes applications of large scale studies very labour intensive.EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo