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Are Opinions Based on Science: Modelling Social Response to Scientific Facts

Posted on by Hans Dillaerts

As scientists we like to think that modern societies and their members base their views, opinions and behaviour on scientific facts. This is not necessarily the case, even though we are all (over-) exposed to information flow through various channels of media, i.e. newspapers, television, radio, internet, and web.

It is thought that this is mainly due to the conflicting information on the mass media and to the individual attitude (formed by cultural, educational and environmental factors), that is, one external factor and another personal factor.

In this paper we will investigate the dynamical development of opinion in a small population of agents by means of a computational model of opinion formation in a co-evolving network of socially linked agents.

The personal and external factors are taken into account by assigning an individual attitude parameter to each agent, and by subjecting all to an external but homogeneous field to simulate the effect of the media.

We then adjust the field strength in the model by using actual data on scientific perception surveys carried out in two different populations, which allow us to compare two different societies.

We interpret the model findings with the aid of simple mean field calculations. Our results suggest that scientifically sound concepts are more difficult to acquire than concepts not validated by science, since opposing individuals organize themselves in close communities that prevent opinion consensus. »

URL : http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0042122

EN

Tracing scientists’ research trends realtimely

Posted on by Hans Dillaerts

In this research, we propose a method to trace scientists’ research trends realtimely. By monitoring the downloads of scientific articles in the journal of Scientometrics for 744 hours, namely one month, we investigate the download statistics.

Then we aggregate the keywords in these downloaded research papers, and analyze the trends of article downloading and keyword downloading. Furthermore, taking both the download of keywords and publication of articles into consideration, we design a method to detect the emerging research trends.

We find that in scientometrics field, social media, new indices to quantify scientific productivity (g-index), webometrics, semantic, text mining, open access are emerging fields that information scientists are focusing on. »

URL : http://arxiv.org/abs/1208.1349

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Driving on the Green Road Self archiving Research…

Posted on by Hans Dillaerts

Driving on the Green Road: Self-archiving Research for Open Access in India :

« The basic purpose of this paper is to review the relevance of Institutional Repository in the context of India and to prepare an account of the present state and future prospects of Institutional Repository in India. The paper is an outcome of a review of works in the area of Institutional Repository with specific reference to India. For this purpose, quite a good number of sources of information have been explored, analysed and assessed. The Study reveals that India has a huge potential for the growth of Institutional Repository. Hundreds of universities and thousands of colleges and other institutions including IITs, IIMs, IISc, IGNOU, CSIR and ICSSR centers provide a great scope for Institutional Repository in this country. DSpace is the most dominant software used by 37 (59%) institutional repositories followed by E-Print used by 18(29%) institutional repositories. The institutional repository created by Indian Institute of Science (IISc) Bangalore has been placed among top 116 institutional repositories in the world. »

URL : http://digitalcommons.unl.edu/libphilprac/785/

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Preliminary survey of leading general medicine journals’ use…

Posted on by Hans Dillaerts

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

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Mobilizing Curriculum Studies in a Virtual World Open…

Posted on by Hans Dillaerts

Mobilizing Curriculum Studies in a (Virtual) World: Open Access, Edupunks, and the Public Good :

« Despite societal imperatives for equity—whether espoused by nation states or transnational agencies like UNESCO—current models of higher education are unequivocally failing to provide universal access. This paper seeks to explore the (cyber)spaces (un)occupied by higher education, specifically in the area of curriculum studies, arguing that the World Wide Web can be used to effect the democratization of education. Further, it argues for the benefits of Open Access research by means of a small-scale empirical study, the results of which indicate that making research openly accessible does not diminish the impact of research, but rather may actually increase it. »

URL : http://ojs.vre.upei.ca/index.php/cje-rce/article/view/1149

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Web Impact Factor WIF and Link Analysis of…

Posted on by Hans Dillaerts

Web Impact Factor (WIF) and Link Analysis of Indian Institute of Technologies (IITs): A Webometric Study :

« This paper examines and explores the web impact factor through a webometric study of the present 16 Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) of India. Identifies the domain systems of the websites; analyzes the number of web pages and link pages, and calculates the simple web impact factor (WIF), self link web impact factor and external web impact factor of all the IIT. Also reflects that some IIT have higher number of web pages, but correspondingly their link pages are very small in number and websites fall behind in their simple, self link and external link web impact factor. »

URL : http://digitalcommons.unl.edu/libphilprac/789/

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Maximizing the impacts of your research a handbook…

Posted on by Hans Dillaerts

Maximizing the impacts of your research: a handbook for social scientists :

« There are few academics who are interested in doing research that simply has no influence on anyone else in academia or outside. Some perhaps will be content to produce ‘shelf-bending’ work that goes into a library (included in a published journal or book), and then over the next decades ever-so-slightly bends the shelf it sits on. But we believe that they are in a small minority. The whole point of social science research is to achieve academic impact by advancing your discipline, and (where possible) by having some positive influence also on external audiences – in business, government, the media, civil society or public debate.

For the past year a team of academics based at the London School of Economics, the University of Leeds and Imperial College London have been working on the Impact of Social Sciences project aimed at developing precise methods for measuring and evaluating the impact of research in the public sphere. We believe our data will be of interest to all UK universities to better capture and track the impacts of their social science research and applications work.

Part of our task is to develop guidance for colleagues interested in this field. In the past, there has been no one source of systematic advice on how to maximize the academic impacts of your research in terms of citations and other measures of influence. And almost no sources at all have helped researchers to achieve greater visibility and impacts with audiences outside the university. Instead researchers have had to rely on informal knowledge and picking up random hints and tips here and there from colleagues, and from their own personal experience.

This Handbook remedies this key gap and, we hope, will help researchers achieving a more professional and focused approach to their research from the outset. It provides a large menu of sound and evidence-based advice and guidance on how to ensure that your work achieves its maximum visibility and influence with both academic and external audiences. As with any menu, readers need to pick and choose the elements that are relevant for them. We provide detailed information on what constitutes good practice in expanding the impact of social science research. We also survey a wide range of new developments, new tools and new techniques that can help make sense of a rapidly changing
field. »

URL : http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/35758/