Increasingly code and algorithms are techniques also applied in textual scholarship, giving rise to new interactions between software engineers and textual scholars. This book argues that much of... Show moreIncreasingly code and algorithms are techniques also applied in textual scholarship, giving rise to new interactions between software engineers and textual scholars. This book argues that much of that process and its effects on textual scholarship are still poorly understood and go unchecked by otherwise normal processes of quality control in scholarship such as peer review. The text provides case studies in which some of these interactions become more apparent, as well as the academic challenges and problems that they introduce. The book demonstrates that the space between code creation and conventional scholarship is one that offers many affordances to textual scholarship that until now remain unexplored. The author argues that it is an intellectual obligation of programmers and textual scholars to examine the properties of digital text and how its existence changes and challenges textual scholarship. Show less
This dissertation takes ambiguity as its main theoretical focal point. It illustrates how ambiguity is used strategically from many sides. Further it presents novel approaches to conceptualizing... Show moreThis dissertation takes ambiguity as its main theoretical focal point. It illustrates how ambiguity is used strategically from many sides. Further it presents novel approaches to conceptualizing ambiguous content and ambiguous relationships. In addition it is concerned with potentiality and temporality.The deliberate ambiguity of viral stories and the chaos surrounding them, elaborates on how to create an account while accounting for positioning in time as well as space. It elaborates on the way both ethnographer and informants simultaneously create accounts that are specific to their positions, and that these specificities must be considered as the ethnographer shifts between different modes of ordering while in the field, while analyzing, and while retrospectively accounting for past events. The dissertation takes a methodological stance towards embracing conflicts, discontinuity, and messy data as the source of understanding. Deliberately looking for temporalities, potentiality, and ambiguity encourages a focus on uncertainty, open ends, and multiple possible versions. Doing so is crucial when attending to matters that are both sudden, intensive, highly digitally mediated, and subject to massive attention.The dissertation provides methodological as well as practical concerns, valuable to researchers whose object of study is brief but intense, including the retrospective representation of it. Show less
The increasing popularity of Twitter in both scholarly communication and public engagement with science has triggered widespread Twitter interactions around scientific information, thus giving rise... Show moreThe increasing popularity of Twitter in both scholarly communication and public engagement with science has triggered widespread Twitter interactions around scientific information, thus giving rise to the emergence of scholarly Twitter metrics which aim to measure and characterize Twitter interactions related to scholarly objects. For the sake of more advanced scholarly Twitter metrics, the overarching aim of this PhD dissertation is to characterize diverse forms of Twitter interactions around scientific papers to understand in greater-depth the Twitter reception of scientific information and improve scholarly Twitter metrics. To this end, this dissertation starts with large-scale analyses of how many and how fast scientific papers are mentioned on Twitter in comparison with other types of social media metric data sources, to unravel the broadness and speed of Twitter presence of scientific papers. Then, focusing on scholarly tweets of scientific papers per se, this dissertation investigates the characteristics of diverse user interaction behaviors around scholarly tweets, shedding light on their potential value in developing more advanced indicators for measuring deeper levels of Twitter reception of scientific information. Finally, based on the main findings, this dissertation further discusses the possibility to approach a more fine-grained indicator system of scholarly Twitter metrics. Show less
In many scholarly disciplines, books – not articles – are the norm. As print runs become smaller, the question arises whether publishing monographs in open access helps to make their contents... Show moreIn many scholarly disciplines, books – not articles – are the norm. As print runs become smaller, the question arises whether publishing monographs in open access helps to make their contents globally accessible. To answer this question, the results of multiple studies on the usage of open access books are presented. The research focuses on three areas: economic viability; optimization of open access monographs infrastructure and measuring the effects of open access in terms of scholarly impact and societal influence. Each chapter reviews a different aspect: book sales, digital dissemination, open licenses, user communities, measuring usage, developing countries and the effects on citations and social media. Show less
The availability of indicators based on social media has opened the possibility to track the online interactions between social media users and scholarly entities. Indicators derived from these... Show moreThe availability of indicators based on social media has opened the possibility to track the online interactions between social media users and scholarly entities. Indicators derived from these online interactions reflect aspects such as how often, by whom, and when are scholarly publications mentioned and discussed on social media platforms. These new indicators, popularly known as altmetrics and more technically referred as social media metrics are usually proposed as potential alternatives to citation-based indicators to inform research evaluation. The research presented in this book provides the state of the art in the possibilities of social media metrics for informing research evaluation. The main ambition is to increase the knowledge and understanding of the limitations, challenges, and actual possibilities of social media metrics for research evaluation. This thesis describes the presence and distribution of different social media metrics across scientific publications and their relationship with traditional impact indicators. It further describes the main characteristics of publications mentioned in Mendeley as one of the main social media metrics platforms. Moreover, critical challenges regarding data quality issues of social media data are thoroughly described and discussed. Finally, some possibilities and applications of social media metrics for informing research evaluation are presented. Show less
The research presented in this PhD thesis describes ways of identifying at an early-stage, 2-3 years after their publication, discoveries in science that are expected to have a major impact on... Show moreThe research presented in this PhD thesis describes ways of identifying at an early-stage, 2-3 years after their publication, discoveries in science that are expected to have a major impact on science. Bibliographic information extracted from those scientific publications is analysed to select patterns that may identify such `scientific breakthroughs’. A distinction is made between different types of breakthroughs. A major methodological issue is the differentiation between discoveries that actually achieve a long-term major impact on science and those where the impact has not occurred within the first three years. These impacts are measured in terms of `citations’ from subsequent research publications.This thesis introduces the conceptual framework that is used to analyses four case studies, each study focussing on a specific well-documented breakthrough discovery. The citation impact patterns are analysed in a search for bibliographic markers that are characteristic for a breakthrough discovery. The significance of the various markers, one set of markers for each type of breakthrough, were tested in a large-scale validation study.This study resulted in several early-stage identification algorithms. Five of these algorithms were implemented as automated computerized search methods. The algorithms have proved able, retrospectively, to identify early-stage publications that present (potential) breakthrough discoveries. Show less
A lack of career opportunities and long spells of temporary employment are seen as major problems in science, and are thought to decrease the attractiveness of the scientific profession. In... Show more A lack of career opportunities and long spells of temporary employment are seen as major problems in science, and are thought to decrease the attractiveness of the scientific profession. In the long run, this could hurt countries’ ability to conduct high-quality research and innovation. This dissertation examines the origin and effects of the preponderance of junior and temporary jobs in science. The research described in the dissertation shows how career prospects and employment conditions have changed in Germany since the emergence of the research university, and how publications careers of PhD graduates have changed in the United States since the 1950s. Furthermore, the dissertation describes how career prospects and employment conditions affect the job choice of recent PhD graduates. Women are more negative about career prospects and employment conditions in science and are therefore more affected by these issues when choosing a job. In addition, the dissertation describes how student status of PhD candidates limits the availability of material research infrastructure. Finally, the research in the dissertation shows that temporary employment decreases job satisfaction and affects the personal life of PhD graduates. Show less
Globally, the call for impact of science on society is louder than ever. The Netherlands is no exception. In 2004, valorisation was introduced as a core element of Dutch science policy, aiming to... Show moreGlobally, the call for impact of science on society is louder than ever. The Netherlands is no exception. In 2004, valorisation was introduced as a core element of Dutch science policy, aiming to increase the societal benefits of academic research. In scientific practice, the introduction of valorisation meant scientists got a new task, in addition to teaching and education. This thesis studies the valorisation policy from a principal-agent perspective. It aims to answer two questions. 1) How has the valorisation policy of Dutch government been translated to academic practice in the Netherlands between 2004 and 2014? And 2) How can societal benefits of academic research be evaluated? Scientists from a multitude of disciplines have been interviewed and surveyed and policy documents have been studied. The first key result is that the Dutch science system is in a transition. Scientists are motivated to engage with society and do so in many different ways. However, they have a limited understanding of valorisation policies and feel poorly equipped for the task. The second key result is that valorisation should be evaluated as a process. This facilitates learning among scientists and as such allows for improving valorisation practices. The study ends with policy recommendations. Show less
Digital humanities is an emerging field whose practitioners apply digital technology to humanistic research problems. Its manifestations are diverse: from the use of online annotation tools in the... Show moreDigital humanities is an emerging field whose practitioners apply digital technology to humanistic research problems. Its manifestations are diverse: from the use of online annotation tools in the collaborative study of empirical sources, the computational analysis of large corpora of textual data, to the use of provocative digital performances for exploring the twists and turns of poststructuralist theory. At the same time, such engagement with novel technologies is often full of tension. In contrast to the single-author, monograph-oriented research that characterizes established forms of scholarship, digital humanities is often practiced in collaborative, interdisciplinary projects that produces digital output rather than traditional publications. The use of digital technology thus creates exciting new possibilities to supplement and extend humanistic knowledge production, but it also entails uncommon requirements regarding the epistemic, social, and material organization of research. Drawing on a combination of ethnographic work and theories from Science & Technology Studies, this thesis investigates the conflicts that arise as scholars try to incorporate digital approaches into their established practices. Its main argument is that lasting innovations in the scholarly work process will only be possible if they are informed by a reflexive sensibility for the history and organizational specificities of the humanities. Show less
The research described in this thesis aims to establish the use of detailed collaboration and citation analysis combined with other forms of bibliometric analysis as a tool enabling a better... Show moreThe research described in this thesis aims to establish the use of detailed collaboration and citation analysis combined with other forms of bibliometric analysis as a tool enabling a better understanding of the organization of scientific communities and the way knowledge is spread inside scientific communities. In the study of collaboration networks the main goal is to identify existing research groups, potential research groups, and patterns of collaboration. The analysis of citations networks through specific measures and metrics, on the other hand, makes it possible to identify main lines of research through the years. Thus, such analyses improve our understanding of the growth and decline of fields, including phenomena such as paradigm shifts and emerging research themes. Network measures and metrics also allow for the identification of important nodes (e.g., journals, articles) embedded in the citation network. Show less
The use and visualisation of structures in science (sets of related publications, authors, words) is investigated in a number of applications. We hold that the common ground of a field can explain... Show moreThe use and visualisation of structures in science (sets of related publications, authors, words) is investigated in a number of applications. We hold that the common ground of a field can explain the use and applicability of these structures. Show less
Bibliometric maps of science are landscapes of scientific research fields created by quantitative analysis of bibliographic data. In such maps the 'cities' are, for instance, research topics.... Show moreBibliometric maps of science are landscapes of scientific research fields created by quantitative analysis of bibliographic data. In such maps the 'cities' are, for instance, research topics. Topics with a strong cognitive relation are in each other's vicinity and topics with a weak relation are distant from each other. These maps have several domains of application. As a policy supportive tool they can be applied to overview the structure of a research field and to monitor its evolution. This book contributes to the development of this application of bibliometric maps. Show less
