Discussion of scholarly information in research blogs by Hadas Shema.
From the post:
As some of you know, Mike Thelwall, Judit Bar-Ilan (both are my dissertation advisors) and myself published an article called “Research Blogs and the Discussion of Scholarly Information” in PLoS One. Many people showed interest in the article, and I thought I’d write a “director’s commentary” post. Naturally, I’m saving all your tweets and blog posts for later research.
The Sample
We characterized 126 blogs with 135 authors from Researchblogging.Org (RB), an aggregator of blog posts dealing with peer-review research. Two over-achievers had two blogs each, and 11 blogs had two authors.
While our interest in research blogs started before we ever heard of RB, it was reading an article using RB that really kick-started 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. Major drooling ensued at that point. People citing in a scholarly manner out of their free will? It’s Christmas!
Questions that stand out for me on blogs:
Will our indexing/searching of blogs have the same all or nothing granularity of scholarly articles?
If not, why not?