Scholarly Research Blogs Going Strong

June 3, 2012

More indications of trouble for the big buck professional scientific technical medical publishers—the scholarly research blog has become a big enough phenomenon to warrant its own scholarly study. Scientific American hosts a “Discussion of Scholarly Information in Research Blogs.” In this write up, Hadas Shema discusses an article she published with colleagues characterizing 126 blogs found at aggregator site Researchblogging.Org. She shares their inspiration for the project:

“Groth & Gurney (2010) wrote an article titled ‘Studying scientific discourse on the Web using bibliometrics: A chemistry blogging case study.’ The article made for a fascinating read, because it applied bibliometric methods to blogs. Just like it says in the title, Groth & Gurney took the references from 295 blog posts about Chemistry and analyzed them the way one would analyze citations from peer-reviewed articles. They managed that because they used RB, which aggregates only posts by bloggers who take the time to formally cite their sources.”

Ms Shema goes on to discuss the teams reasoning, roadblocks, and some of their findings complete with infographics. Shema is an Information Science graduate student at Israel’s Bar-Ilan University and a member of ACUMEN.

Cynthia Murrell, Sponsored by PolySpot

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Stephen E. Arnold monitors search, content processing, text mining and related topics from his high-tech nerve center in rural Kentucky. He tries to winnow the goose feathers from the giblets. He works with colleagues worldwide to make this Web log useful to those who want to go "beyond search". Contact him at sa [at] arnoldit.com. His Web site with additional information about search is arnoldit.com.