The Embedded Repository: Introducing an Institutional Repository to a New Audience Via Location-Aware Social Networking

Authors : Robin A. Bedenbaugh, Holly Mercer

The authors report the outcome of a partnership between a university marketing and communications department and a university library. The research aimed to determine whether providing links to institutional digital repository content on location-based social media is a viable marketing approach.

Foursquare Tips were added to locations on the Texas A&M University campus with links to repository content. The authors subsequently monitored repository traffic using Google analytics to determine how many users were being referred by the Foursquare service.

Research indicates that users will click through links on Foursquare to visit the institutional repository, and that they will explore further once they are there. This was an initial exploration. More data will be needed to determine precisely the best way to market services through location-based or location-aware services.”

URL : https://journals.tdl.org/pal/index.php/pal/article/view/6062

Preliminary survey of leading general medicine journals’ use…

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Preliminary survey of leading general medicine journals’ use of Facebook and Twitter :

Aim: This study is the first to chart the use of Facebook and Twitter by peer-reviewed medical journals.

Methods: We selected the top 25 general medicine journals on the Thomson Reuters Journal Citation Report (JCR) list. We surveyed their Facebook and Twitter presences and scanned their Web sites for any Facebook and (or) Twitter features as of November 2011.

Results/Discussion: 20 of 25 journals had some sort of Facebook presence, with 11 also having a Twitter presence. Total ‘Likes’ across all of the Facebook pages for journals with a Facebook presence were 321,997, of which 259, 902 came from the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) alone. The total numbers of Twitter ‘Followers’ were smaller by comparison when compiled across all surveyed journals. ‘Likes’ and ‘Followers’ are not the equivalents of total accesses but provide some proxy measure for impact and popularity. Those journals in our sample making best use of the open sharing nature of social media are closed-access; with the leading open access journals on the list lagging behind by comparison. We offer a partial interpretation for this and discuss other findings of our survey, provide some recommendations to journals wanting to use social media, and finally present some future research directions.

Conclusions: Journals should not underestimate the potential of social media as a powerful means of reaching out to their readership.”

URL : http://pubs.chla-absc.ca/doi/full/10.5596/c2012-010

Information Diffusion and External Influence in Networks …

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Information Diffusion and External Influence in Networks :

“Social networks play a fundamental role in the diffusion of information. However, there are two different ways of how information reaches a person in a network. Information reaches us through connections in our social networks, as well as through the influence of external out-of-network sources, like the mainstream media. While most present models of information adoption in networks assume information only passes from a node to node via the edges of the underlying network, the recent availability of massive online social media data allows us to study this process in more detail. We present a model in which information can reach a node via the links of the social network or through the influence of external sources. We then develop an efficient model parameter fitting technique and apply the model to the emergence of URL mentions in the Twitter network. Using a complete one month trace of Twitter we study how information reaches the nodes of the network. We quantify the external influences over time and describe how these influences affect the information adoption. We discover that the information tends to “jump” across the network, which can only be explained as an effect of an unobservable external influence on the network. We find that only about 71% of the information volume in Twitter can be attributed to network diffusion, and the remaining 29% is due to external events and factors outside the network.”

URL : http://arxiv.org/abs/1206.1331

Beyond citations Scholars’ visibility on the social Web…

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Beyond citations: Scholars’ visibility on the social Web :

“Traditionally, scholarly impact and visibility have been measured by counting publications and citations in the scholarly literature. However, increasingly scholars are also visible on the Web, establishing presences in a growing variety of social ecosystems. But how wide and established is this presence, and how do measures of social Web impact relate to their more traditional counterparts? To answer this, we sampled 57 presenters from the 2010 Leiden STI Conference, gathering publication and citations counts as well as data from the presenters’ Web “footprints.” We found Web presence widespread and diverse: 84% of scholars had homepages, 70% were on LinkedIn, 23% had public Google Scholar profiles, and 16% were on Twitter. For sampled scholars’ publications, social reference manager bookmarks were compared to Scopus and Web of Science citations; we found that Mendeley covers more than 80% of sampled articles, and that Mendeley bookmarks are significantly correlated (r=.45) to Scopus citation counts.”

URL : http://arxiv.org/abs/1205.5611

Altmetrics in the wild: Using social media to explore scholarly impact

In growing numbers, scholars are integrating social media tools like blogs, Twitter, and Mendeley into their professional communications. The online, public nature of these tools exposes and reifies scholarly processes once hidden and ephemeral. Metrics based on this activities could inform broader, faster measures of impact, complementing traditional citation metrics. This study explores the properties of these social media-based metrics or “altmetrics”, sampling 24,331 articles published by the Public Library of Science.

We find that that different indicators vary greatly in activity. Around 5% of sampled articles are cited in Wikipedia, while close to 80% have been included in at least one Mendeley library. There is, however, an encouraging diversity; a quarter of articles have nonzero data from five or more different sources. Correlation and factor analysis suggest citation and altmetrics indicators track related but distinct impacts, with neither able to describe the complete picture of scholarly use alone.

There are moderate correlations between Mendeley and Web of Science citation, but many altmetric indicators seem to measure impact mostly orthogonal to citation. Articles cluster in ways that suggest five different impact “flavors”, capturing impacts of different types on different audiences; for instance, some articles may be heavily read and saved by scholars but seldom cited. Together, these findings encourage more research into altmetrics as complements to traditional citation measures.

URL : http://arxiv.org/abs/1203.4745

Inter institutional scientific collaboration an approach from social…

Inter-institutional scientific collaboration: an approach from social network :

“This paper presents a tool that can be used to characterize, analyze and interpret the patterns of collaboration among institutions by means of the visual display of scientific information. These graphic representations allow for a combined analysis of a given institution in the system of relations (network), and of the particular attributes of that institution (indicators). The tool affords the possibility of regenerating the network to make any number of aggregates appear or disappear, thus allowing one to focus on institutional sectors, geographic regions, etc. It also allows for analysis of sectorial interaction, institutional backing of research, and the influence of geographic proximity, linguistic affinity, or regional politics. This is indeed a versatile analytical tool, and it is bound to prove its potential for evaluating patterns of collaborative research, development and innovation.”

URL : http://hdl.handle.net/10760/16704

Building Social Networks from Institutional Repositories An…

Building Social Networks from Institutional Repositories :

“An Institutional Repository may o er a .set of services. to its local users, supporting the publication of research. More importantly, the repository also forms a key component in the global scholarly communications environment. In this presentation we investigate the role of the repository on a global scale by witnessing the e ects on a changing economy and also show how worldwide collaboration networks can be predicted using the strong social links found in repository metadata.”

URL : http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/22683/