This is a copy of a guest post I wrote for the LSE Impact of Social Sciences blog: In 1990, Tim Berners-Lee created the Web as a tool for scholarly communication at CERN. In the two decades since, his creation has gone on to transform practically every enterprise imaginable–except, somehow, scholarly communication. Here, instead, we [...]
Category Archives: research
Has journal commenting failed?
January 7, 2011 – 4:00 am
It’s a great idea: take all the insights, suggestions, and criticisms on scholarly articles, the comments shared in journal clubs and scribbled in margins the world over, and make them accessible to everyone. Attach them to the article itself; make it a conversation, not an artifact. We have blog commenting, video commenting–why not article commenting? [...]
Scientometrics 2.0
July 10, 2010 – 10:21 pm
I’m excited that I’ve had two papers accepted this week: “Scientometrics 2.0: Toward new metrics of scholarly impact on the social Web,” with Brad Hemminger, and “How and why scholars cite on Twitter” (online soon) with Kaitlin Costello. What’s special about these two papers is that they are the start of a research project that [...]
79% of oft-cited statistics are total garbage
July 16, 2008 – 11:43 pm
You know, we learn we remember 10% of what we read, 20% percent of what we hear, but 80% of what we actually experience. Or, wait, maybe it’s 20%. Or 30? Of course, as many people know, this delightful little statistic has no backing in any sort of serious research—nor, indeed, could it: …As Dwyer [...]
Game theory
June 20, 2008 – 7:26 am
Quick, Google a picture of two seagulls next to a rock, with a woman in a red jacket in the foreground. Not too easy, is it? The problem, of course, is that images aren’t indexed by their content; while text is machine-readable (ergo machine-indexable), image indexing still requires the Mark I Eyeball. One solution: throw [...]
Zotero: the best open-source app you’ve never heard of.
May 17, 2008 – 5:46 am
There’s a good chance you’ve never heard of Zotero. But, speaking from experience, Zotero is one of the best open-source projects out there. What is it? In the project website’s words: Zotero [zoh-TAIR-oh] is a free, easy-to-use Firefox extension to help you collect, manage, and cite your research sources. It lives right where you do [...]
