Session on digital research literacies given for staff at the ANU College of Law, 30 July 2015.

1. New media &
digital research literacies
Professor Paul Maharg
paulmaharg.com/slides

2. preview
1. Digital research literacies
2. Scholarly peer networks: SSRN, Academia, ResearchGate,
Google Scholar, LinkedIn, CarbonMade, etc
3. Publishing platforms: blogs, Slideshare, Twitter, Buzzfeed
4. Bibliometrics > altmetrics
5. Some research…
6. Some personal conclusions

3. why should we care about this?
What scandalized the serious scholar Erasmus (as it fascinated
Dürer) was the fact that, not much more than half a century
after the first appearance of the printed book, demand had
turned it into a product beyond the control of the scholars and
specialists. The book had taken over as the transmitter of
European written culture, before scholars and educators had
had time to come to terms with its power and influence.
(Jardine, 1996, p. 228)
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4. 1. Digital research literacies

5. digital media
Pros Cons
Wide dissemination, remains at a more or
less fixed place for readers to return &
download, etc
Can be time-consuming & addictive; are
you getting to the people you want to
read your stuff?
Gathering, sorting, archiving of digital
information very useful
Apps disappear or go corporate
Builds academic profile through altmetrics Can encourage narcissism & grandiosity if
used as vanity projects
Facilitates the Open – open access, open
education, OE resources
Privacy can be an issue (cf Facebook)
Supports knowledge as a public good Do we want that? Should knowledge
always be public?
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6. deeper issues
1. What’s digital?
Specific devices, networks, assemblages? Technical, educational, research
affordances, modes of text and search, specific skills, competences, practices,
environments?
2. How does digital alter social?
Eg distributed communities, socio-material understandings, means of production
& modes of use
3. How does digital (+ social) alter literacies?
Eg artefacts and practices, formal and informal contexts of research, visual
artefacts, digital curation.
4. How does digital encourage metricization of our working lives, and what can we
do about it?
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7. transforming features of digital…
• Replicability
• Mutability
• Connectivity
• Instantaneity (& the ‘nearly now’)
• Portability
• Identity
(Jones 2013, 162-65)
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8. so surely our staff pages…?
• Almost no social sharing
• Static pages
• No reference to academic tools or modes of
communication
• Pretty much social media-free
• Occasionally useful for linking to repositories to view
‘versions of record’. Or email addresses…
1

9. and now impact comes over the horizon
In REF2014, it meant evidencing a narrative that was:
Instrumental
• Influencing the development of policy practice or service provision
• Shaping behaviour
• Altering legislation
Conceptual
• Contributing to our understanding of the above
• Reframing debates

10. Capacity-building
• Technical/professional skills development
Cultural change
• Increased willingness to engage in knowledge exchange activities – by
individuals, and/or institutions
• Changed mindsets
Enduring connectivity
• Establishment of enduring academic / non-academic relationships –
indicator of potential future achievements or impacts

11. 2. Scholarly peer networks

12. scholarly peer networks
• SSRN
• Google Scholar: http://bit.ly/1umHCmP
• Academia: bit.ly/1oaK9hj
• ResearchGate: http://bit.ly/10k3dyE
• LinkedIn: http://linkd.in/1DSQvnn
• Carbonmade: http://bit.ly/1GfMZY4
• Zotero
• Evernote
2/3

13. publishing platforms: blogging
http://paulmaharg.com
17.3.2005 > present. Used for:
• Dissemination of ideas & research
• Construction yard for sections of papers & articles
• Sky-writing (Steven Harnard)
• Identity formation
• Connecting on Blawg
2/3

14. publishing platforms: blogging2/3

15. publishing platforms: slidedecks & Twitter
http://slideshare.net/paulmaharg
Used for:
• Dissemination of slidedecks
• Set alerts for others’ presentations
• Re Twitter, use third-party apps & aggregators, eg
TweetDeck to manage the dataflow
2/3

16. publishing platforms: slidedecks & Twitter2/3

17. publishing platforms: slidedecks & Twitter2/3

18. including pre- / post-conference chat2/3

19. some slideshare stats2/3

21. publishing platforms: Buzzfeed
(surely not Buzzfeed?)2/3

22. Yes, Buzzfeed
http://bit.ly/1JFKYp0
2/3

23. 4. Bibliometrics > altmetrics

24. altmetrics…?
See altmetrics.org:
‘the creation and study of new metrics based on the
Social Web for analyzing and informing scholarship’
4

25. existing impact: how we are judged
Existing filters:
• Peer-review
• Citation counting
eg h-index
• Journal Impact Factor (JIF)
4

26. existing impact: how we are judged
• … of a journal: A measure of the average number of citations
to articles published in science & social science journals in a 3-
year period (Eugene Garfield, ISI). Calculated annually for the
journals indexed in Thomson Reuters Journal Citation
Reports.
• Calculation: number of times articles were cited in indexed
journals divided by number of items published in journals.
• Pressure on authors to enter high-ranked journals
• Pressure on journals to stay high-ranked
4

27. existing impact: how we are judged…
BUT…
• JIF is easily gamed:
http://bit.ly/1uYDPgE
• And gives inaccurate views of
journal quality:
http://bit.ly/1Ddo8Be
4

28. … hence altmetrics
‘With altmetrics, we can crowdsource peer-review. Instead of waiting months for two
opinions, an article’s impact might be assessed by thousands of conversations and
bookmarks in a week. In the short term, this is likely to supplement traditional peer-
review, perhaps augmenting rapid review in journals like PLoS ONE, BMC Research
Notes or BMJ Open. In the future, greater participation and better systems for
identifying expert contributors may allow peer review to be performed entirely from
altmetrics.
Unlike the JIF, altmetrics reflect the impact of the article itself, not its venue. Unlike
citation metrics, altmetrics will track impact outside the academy, impact of
influential but uncited work, and impact from sources that aren’t peer-reviewed.
Some have suggested altmetrics would be too easy to game; we argue the opposite.’
altmetrics: a manifesto -- http://bit.ly/1tldeJA
4

29. what might altmetrics look like?
Altmetrics: a manifesto – http://bit.ly/1tldeJA
4

30. ANU page – ‘Increasing your research impact’
http://libguides.anu.edu.au/content.php?pid=499217&sid=4105636
4

31. ResearchGate stats for week ending Jul 12 2015
Publication Publication Citations Views
downloads views
4

32. Citation analysis –
are the tools perfect for the job?
• Web of Science should not be used alone for locating citations to an author or
title.
• Scopus and Google Scholar can help identify a considerable number of
valuable citations not found in Web of Science;
• Scopus and Google Scholar can help identify a considerable number of
citations in document types not covered by ISI citation databases;
• Scopus and Google Scholar may assist in providing a more comprehensive
picture of the extent of international and interdisciplinary nature of
scholarly communication of and among researchers; and
• Google Scholar has several technical problems that users should be aware
of in order to accurately and effectively locate citations.
• The selection of the database(s) for locating citation is field-dependent.
g,KidukandMeho,LokmanI.CitationAnalysis:AComparisonofGoogle
olar,Scopus,andWebofScience.,2006.In69thAnnualMeetingofthe
ericanSocietyforInformationScienceandTechnology(ASIST),Austin
),3-8November2006.[Conferencepaper],
://eprints.rclis.org/8605/
4

33. …so crowdsourcing via the Open movement, in
data & scholarship, might be the answer?
Eg
• Datacite
• DASH (Harvard)
• Caselaw
• Ravel Law
Further reading:
http://bit.ly/1LgPtbo
• ANU Digital Collections
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34. and there are tools to measure institutions4

35. learning more about biblio>alt
Quantifying and Analysing Scholarly Communications on the Web, June ‘15
http://ascw.know-center.tugraz.at/

36. http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/hefcemetrics-review/

37. The Metric Tide argues for metrics with …
• Robustness: basing metrics on the best possible data in terms of accuracy
and scope;
• Humility: recognising that quantitative evaluation should support – but
not supplant – qualitative, expert assessment;
• Transparency: keeping data collection and analytical processes open and
transparent, so that those being evaluated can test and verify the results;
• Diversity: accounting for variation by field, and using a variety of
indicators to support diversity across the research system;
• Reflexivity: recognising systemic and potential effects of indicators and
updating them in response.
www.hefce.ac.uk/rsrch/metrics

38. 5. Some research findings

39. So why digital research literacy?
For all these reasons & more…
• Quantify and document research impact
• Justify future requests for funding
• Quantify return on research investment
• Discover how research findings are being used
• Identify similar research projects
• Identify possible collaborators
• Determine if research findings are duplicated, confirmed, corrected, improved or repudiated
• Determine if research findings were extended
• Confirm that research findings were properly attributed/credited
• Demonstrate that research findings are resulting in meaningful outcomes
• Discover community benefit as a result of research findings
• Progress reports to funders etc
• Promotion dossiers
AdaptedfromtheBeckerModel,@
https://becker.wustl.edu/impact-assessment/model
5

40. effect of hierarchy?
• ‘Social network analysis revealed that discipline was influential in defining
community structure, while academic seniority was linked to the position
of nodes within the network.’
• ‘The survey revealed a contradiction between academics use of the sites
and their position within the networks the sites foster. Junior academics
were found to be more active users of the sites, agreeing to a greater
extent with the perceived benefits, yet having fewer connections and
occupying a more peripheral position in the network.’
Jordan (2014)
5

41. effect on open access to knowledge?
• ‘Like Apple, Nature now
intends to sell its “products”
as a branded empire.’
• ‘Increasingly those who control
the means of communication
influence the way we work, think and act.
ReadCube destroys our freedom.
So maybe we'll shortly return to the
browser-wars "this paper only viewable
on Read-Cube". If readers are
brainwashed into compliance by
technology restrictions our future is grim.’
5
http://bit.ly/1KzKBzQ

42. • ‘Using data from the Teaching, Research, and International Policy project on peer-
reviewed publications between 1980 and 2006, we show that women are
systematically cited less than men after controlling for a large number of variables
including year of publication, venue of publication, substantive focus, theoretical
perspective, methodology, tenure status, and institutional affiliation.’
• ‘Articles authored by women are systematically less central than articles authored
by men, all else equal. This is likely because (1) women tend to cite themselves
less than men, and (2) men (who make up a disproportionate share of IR scholars)
tend to cite men more than women. This is the first study in political science to
reveal significant gender differences in citation patterns and is especially
meaningful because citation counts are increasingly used as a key measure of
research's quality and impact.’ Maliniak et al 2013
effects re gender differences in citation?5

43. 6. Some conclusions

44. what can ANU Law researchers do?
• Acknowledge the ceaseless emergence of technology, and engage with it
as widely as our time & energy allows
• Base our practices on community and collaboration: share what we know,
learn from each other
• Be Open in teaching and research: support the Open movement
• Read & engage with the research eg on Impact Blog
• Use it: use new media to shape our research and our narratives of social
engagement and impact – before someone else shapes it for us
6

45. references
BIALL Legal Information Literacy Statement, http://www.biall.org.uk/data/files/BIALL_Legal_Information_Literacy_Statement_July_2012.pdf
Cheston, C.C., Flickinger, T.E., Chisholm, M.S. (2013). Social media use in medical education: A systematic review, Academic Medicine. 88, 6,
893-901.
Holmes, K. (2014). Going beyond bibliometric and altmetric counts to understand impact. http://libraryconnect.elsevier.com/articles/2014-
05/going-beyond-bibliometric-and-altmetric-counts-understand-impact#sthash.4stanFFN.dpuf
Jardine, L. (1996). Worldly Goods: A New History of the Renaissance. Macmillan, London.
Jones, C. (2013). The digital university: a concept in need of definition. In R. Goodfellow, M.R.Lea, eds, Literacy in the Digital University.
Critical Perspectives on Learning, Scholarship and Technology. SRHE, Routledge, London, 162-172.
Jordan, K. (2014). Academics and their online networks: Exploring the role of academic social networking sites. Available at:
http://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/4937/4159
Konkiel, S. (2014) Playing with altmetrics. http://theresearchwhisperer.wordpress.com/2014/10/21/altmetrics-services/#more-3175
Maliniak, D., Powers, R., Walter, B.F. (2013). The gender citation gap in International Relations. International Organization, 67, 4, 889-922.
http://bit.ly/1yYFxym
SCONUL Seven Pillars of Information Literacy (2011). The Core Model.http://www.sconul.ac.uk/sites/default/files/documents/coremodel.pdf
Veletsianos, G. (2013). Open practices and identity: Evidence from researchers and educators’ social media participation. British Journal of
Education Technology, 44, 4, 639-51.
Yang, Kiduk and Meho, Lokman I. Citation Analysis: A Comparison of Google Scholar, Scopus, and Web of Science., 2006 . In 69th Annual
Meeting of the American Society for Information Science and Technology (ASIST), Austin (US), 3-8 November 2006. [Conference paper],
http://eprints.rclis.org/8605/

46. Email:paul.maharg@anu.edu.au
Web: paulmaharg.com
Slides: paulmaharg.com/slides