Scientometrics 2.0, part I

Today we're going to discuss this paper, by Priem and Hemminger (2010), dealing with Scientometrics (a general name for Bibliometrics, Webometrics, Influmetrics, and all sorts of other metrics regarding scientific activity). But, before we start, I want to protest First Monday's terrible references format. Sure, it looks fine in-text, with the last name and the year, but at the reference list the references start with the first letter of the author's first name! How am I supposed to know the author's first name? Only Darwin knows.

Anyway, Priem and Hemminger offer a state-of-the-art review of Web 2.0 tools that can be mined for scholarly data. They suggest seven categories of tools, of which I'm only going to mention four in this post.

1. Microblogging - Microblogging means Twitter. Twitter is used by scientists, among others, to discuss papers and conferences. From my experience, many people tweet from conferences under the conference hashtag.

2. Social Bookmarking - Social bookmarking services like Delicious, Connotea and CiteULike can be mined and show scientific trends by pointing out the popular papers bookmarked and popular tags.

3. Wikipedia - Wikipedia is popular among students and faculty as a starting point for basic knowledge. For other web users, Wikipedia is often their only knowledge source. So, papers cited in Wikipedia are more likely to have public impact. Indeed, the JCR and Wikipedia citations correlate well.

4. Blogging - By now, blogs are well- established in the web culture. Many scientists, Fields Medalists included, maintain scholarly blogs. When discussing academic papers, those scientists often cite their sources in traditional manner. Excellent examples are posts aggregated by the Research Blogging service.

That's it for today. The next part will discuss other categories of Web 2.0 services with possible scholarly use.