The Shift to the Use of Online Sources

There has been a marked shift to scholars accessing material online. Academics and their students are increasingly relying nearly exclusively on online resources. This is particularly true of more recent cohorts, with younger scholars much more likely to retrieve articles electronically (Sathe, Grady, & Giuse, 2002), although some recent work has suggested that the “Google Generation” are actually often quite poor at finding and evaluating information (Centre for Information Behaviour and the Evaluation of Research, 2008). As Borgman notes, whereas academic researchers may be able to make “fine distinctions…in assessing the quality of a document…students, practitioners, scholars with minimal access to the published literature, and the general public usually are happy to read and cite any free version of a document they can find online” (2007: 84). However, even if college students do more than simply use Google searches for sources and make use of other online sources such as Wikipedia as well as offline sources, the very fact that they are uncertain about which sources to use suggests that visibility and access are important determinants of what they will find.

Informal Scientific Communication Online

There are also various novel forms of electronic informal scientific communication such as blogs, personal webpages, Podcasts, YouTube videos, and Wikis. These are now being added to existing informal modes of academic communication, which include e-mail, e-mail lists, conferences, and professional newsletters. While older electronic communications often represent technological replacements for existing modes of communication (such as e-mail replacing snail mail), the same is not true of many of the latest innovations. Blogging does not have a clear analogue in the paper-based world; journal writers may have kept track of their thoughts on a variety of topics, but they did not post them publicly unless they published them as memoirs at a much later date.

Online Visibility

For formal and informal academic materials to have any impact, they must be visible to their potential audiences. This is one area where the Internet offers much greater potential than the library-based paper publishing system ever did. Once academic material is on the web, particularly if located in open-access sources indexed by Google and other search engines, other scholars and members of the general public at least have a chance of finding the material. The apocryphal story of the doctoral dissertation on the library shelf still containing the $20 bill hidden there decades earlier by its author reflects the understanding that few would bother to access something difficult to find and of such limited interest. Putting the same dissertation online doesn’t make it more interesting to a wide audience, but it does make it much more likely that if someone is interested, they might take a look at it on the Web. The same is true of a variety of other academic outputs.

As for access by the general public, for much scholarly work there will always be a quite limited public audience. Nevertheless, the Internet is not compartmentalized and divided into separate physical spaces the same way that public libraries and academic libraries have been traditionally. By mixing one’s academic work in with the other material in the cloud of information that everyone uses on the Internet, it becomes more likely that others may stumble on it than if it is locked away in dusty, little-visited academic libraries. Borgman puts it succinctly: “content that is online gets more use than that which is not” (2007, p. 159). And, as Heimeriks and Vasileiadou (2008) point out, “a scientist’s visibility does not rely exclusively on the number of publications and their citations but can increasingly result from a well-designed and well-linked homepage providing scientific content” (p. 18).

Digitisation of Research Materials

There is a larger ongoing of digitization of research materials which has been discussed in terms of the materials being digitized (Borgman, 2007; Nentwich, 2003). Borgman points out that most journals in science, technology and medicine have been online for some time (2007, p. 181) and notes that “scientific data are fastest-growing portion of the content layer” of scholarly communication infrastructures (2007, p. 182).

Current efforts to put data and other research materials online and make them searchable and more easily manageable can be seen as attempts to cope with the “data deluge” (Hey & Trefethen, 2003), especially in some of the natural sciences. Equally, however, a more long-term trend is simply the deluge of papers and research materials that researchers in all fields need to cope with. Collins summarized the trend before online material had become available: “what we see around ourselves in recent decades has been an enormous expansion in cultural production. There are over 1 million publications in the natural sciences, over 100,000 in the social sciences, and comparable number in the humanities” (Collins (1998, p. 521) citing de Solla Price (1986, p. 266)). Collins notes that scholars are increasingly “buried in papers” (1998, p. 92), a phenomenon that today extends to electronic papers.

An Online ‘System’

The online ecosystem thus consists of more than just scholarly communication. Within scholarly communication, a distinction is made between formal communication which is long-lasting and addressed to a wider audience and informal communication which is more ephemeral and between a more restricted audience, or between public and private communication. However, as Borgman points out (2007, pp. 48-49), these lines are especially hard to draw with digital scholarship: “in digital environments, dissemination can be difficult to distinguish from access” (Borgman, 2007, p. 87).

Disciplinary Differences

Disciplinary differences are quite apparent with regard to the speed at which the processes described here are occurring. Fry, drawing on Whitley (2000), has argued that, in terms of “the differential role of informal and formal communication across fields”, Whitley’s characteristics of fields have “an influence on the production and use of scholarly networked digital resources” (Fry, 2006, p. 312), such that high-energy physics, with a high degree of mutual dependence and low degree of task uncertainty, is much more likely to produce and use these resources than fields like social/cultural geography, with low degree of mutual dependence and high degree of task uncertainty. There are, however, patterns which override differences like these; for example, researchers in all four fields that Fry, Virkar, & Schroeder (Fry, Virkar, & Schroeder, 2008) examined (terrorism, HIV/Aids, climate change, and internet research) use scholarly networked digital resources in such a way – for example searching with Google – that they are ever more reliant upon these resources.

It is true that field differences in terms of the extent to which electronic scientific communication is adopted will persist (Kling & McKim, 2000; see also Walsh, Kucker, Maloney, & Gabbay, 2000), but even if humanities and social sciences “lag”, this must nevertheless be put in the context that all disciplines are moving in the direction of digitizing online resources. The key point is that all disciplines are doing this in different ways, and will thus be subject to the competition for visibility that we outlined earlier, even if this competition will take various forms.

Shaping Access with Search Engines

The very idea that commercial search engines, and one dominant one in particular, should be used to access scholarly knowledge, would have been unthinkable ten years ago. As noted in Fry et al. (2008) above, Google and Google Scholar are increasingly playing a gatekeeping function in e-Research. Google has actively moved into an area formerly dominated by players such as Thomson/ISI. While the ISI Journal Impact Factor (JIF) is well documented as a strong influence on the behaviour of scholars (particularly in terms of tenure and promotion), the impact of Google is only starting to be discussed more widely (see, for instance, a recent editorial lamenting one new journal’s lack of impact in Google Scholar (Spoelstra, O’Shea, & Kaulingfreks, 2007)).

Social Science Approaches to Online Research

It is interesting to consider how social science is currently somewhat ill-equipped to address the migration of research online. This is due in part to disciplinary specialization, but also in part to the diffuseness of the object under consideration. For online materials, arguably, there are three key elements to consider: the material that has shifted into and become aggregated within this online realm; the gatekeepers and paths to this realm; and finally the users who seek and digest this material as part of their overall information and communication diet – or their information and communication ecology, if you prefer. The concepts of attention space, online visibility and gatekeepers cut across these and might allow us to get us a sense of how the leading edge of research is being shaped. One way to understand the relationships between these, then, might be as follows (see Figure 1).

Figure 1: The e-Scholarly Communication Layer in the Online Ecosystem

The diagram in Figure 1 illustrates the various elements of e-scholarly communication as part of an online ecosystem that has been discussed in this paper. At the top are the shared and distributed tools and resources that are being digitised. This includes datasets, analysis tools, and the rest of a whole range of resources designed to enable online research. In the middle, at the e-Scholarly Communication Layer (e-SCL), we see a variety of formal and informal modes of scholarly communication. The examples towards the left in this tag cloud are generally more informal, and those on the right hand side represent more formal and traditional forms of scholarly communication (including paper journals, which fall outside the e-SCL, but still play an influential role of course in a general SCL). The Internet has played a major role in enabling scientists to engage in more widely disseminated forms of informal communication; some of these forms are enhancements of pre-Internet behaviours, others are novel forms of informal communication.

The next layer is made up of the search engines discussed above, which are one type of filter, along with subscriptions and things like science websites, which filter access to scholarly material. Researchers may access materials directly, as indicated by the arrow directly from the e-SCL, but are generally likely to access materials through one or more of these filtering mechanisms. Of course, the researchers are also producing scholarship, as indicated by the arrow back to the top online research production layer. Finally, the wider public obtains their understanding of science both through researchers who engage in expanding the public understanding of science, but also increasingly through direct access to scientific information through the filters (such as Google) which are widely available to those without university access to resources. This filtered access is a new phenomenon; other than the occasional enthusiast willing to go to an academic library and make photocopies of research articles, the general public in the pre-Internet age had very little direct access to scientific material outside of popular scientific publications such as science magazines and television programmes.

A key element here is that scholars and researchers will be increasingly aware of how their outputs will be affected by their visibility, which will lead them to make these outputs more accessible. The online presence of these outputs, however, is not just shaped by their accessibility, but also by search engines and how these are used. Combining these two patterns produces a feedback loop which operates via a new and expanded system with multiple parts - which makes the gatekeeping function of search engines for competition in the attention space more important, not less. Thus there will also be a novel competition for online visibility which attaches to this new system, and shapes the kinds of knowledge that will gain prominence for researchers who are dependent on and use this system.

If the sociology of science and technology can tell us about the competition at the leading edge of research (Schroeder, 2008), and information science about workings of scholarly communication (Borgman 2007), then the larger context of the increasing use of search engines and the use of online materials among information seekers can complete the picture to provide an understanding of how the knowledge that is produced in society is becoming transformed both in terms of form and content. Even if this is still a new system of online scholarly communication in the making, and it is therefore too early to talk about winners and losers, or to quantify these changes, or to assess the impact of these changes as they are still ongoing, it is possible to say that all disciplines - albeit in different ways - and the very conception of what is regarded as knowledge, will undergo a shift.

Despite the proliferation of the types and the volume of research outputs, there are nevertheless several bottlenecks which academic research needs to go through; mainly search and the focus of attention. Even if there will be a shift in what kind of knowledge is found and becomes transmitted, gatekeepers remain though they are also being transformed. This is why it is important to separate what is misleading from what is prescient in Anderson’s essay (http://www.interdisciplines.org/liquidpub/papers/3) about the impact of Google. Anderson argues that Google and other cloud services will fundamentally change the way science is done. While we agree with Anderson that Google will have a profound impact on science, we disagree with him about the manner in which it will do so. Anderson points out that there are now vast amounts of data online, and suggests that somehow using tools like Google will allow us find patterns in these data that produces new discoveries. He is right about data, but it is not by deep sea trawling through these data per se that novel insights will be gained. Instead – to continue with the metaphor - researchers will still need to know where to cast their nets. And in the rapidly rising and choppy seas of online knowledge, they will need to be more judicious about the types of nets they cast, and what types of catches they will be able to sift out.

One issue with this vision is the conflation of data and datasets. Data is, by and large, cheap, particularly if one doesn’t care so much where it came from as long as it arrives in vast quantities. Turning data into datasets, however, is an arduous process whereby researchers must structure and organize data in order to make sense of it. Datasets are, by and large, expensive, particularly if they are large and care has been taken in their creation and maintenance. The disciplinary differences mentioned above also come into play here: massive piles of data such as Anderson mentions with Venter’s gene sequencing may have been relatively quick to create. Making sense of those data by turning it into datasets, testing it to try to find actual purposes for the genes, is a scientific endeavour that occupies thousands of scientists and millions of dollars now and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future. The careers of those hordes of scientists, in the meantime, will continue to be dominated with the traditional activities of scholars: discovering and creating knowledge. And those hordes are not actually hordes after all: they are part of teams (small and large) working on well-defined issues within particular areas of structured scientific fields.

As we have argued in this essay, Google and its ilk will have a more indirect effect on most areas of knowledge: firstly, a gatekeeper effect, whereby the results found by the Google search engine will achieve more prominence than others; secondly, a player in the competition for visibility, as research increasingly needs to increase its visibility within a limited attention space; and thirdly, by influencing the extent to which manipulable digital materials are used in scholarship. All three trends are mutually reinforcing and therefore powerful, but the effect will be indirect since they largely shift existing offline processes into the online world, with the result that Google doesn’t ‘organize everything we know’ (to use another journalist’s expression), but is certainly a factor that shapes how knowledge is organized. To paraphrase Marx, researchers still make scientific knowledge, but they do not do so as they please. Instead, in online world, they must instead increasingly pay attention to how knowledge is found.

All this can be summed up differently: Academic research materials are moving online and thus partly now derive their visibility and prominence from a non-academic audience and non-academic tools such as commercial search engines. But this flow works both ways: how, for example, should we understand the use of references to Wikipedia in academic works, or the fact that many researchers have their own Wikipedia pages which highlights their publications and ideas? Now one possible to this argument is that: surely it has always been thus, that academics have gained prominence through the use of non-academic channels such as newspapers and television? This overlooks a critical difference, which is that the electronic realm is to some extent a hermetic and self-referential system: that is, online prominence reinforces itself, sometimes without reference to the offline world. This is just one example of how search and visibility can reinforce academic status in a self-referential loop, and the same goes for all online materials. What we have pointed to in this essay is a shifting ecology of online scholarly communication, a much expanded web of research in which, nevertheless, certain mechanisms operate to sift and determine what we know.

Note: A longer version of this essay to be published in a journal is forthcoming and available from the authors. References cited:

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