How and why physicists and chemists use blogs

Pikas, Christina K. How and why physicists and chemists use blogs., 2008 [Preprint]

[img]
Preview
PDF
Pikas_How_and_why_physicists_and_chemists_use_blogs__2008.pdf

Download (152kB) | Preview

English abstract

This study examined how and why chemists and physicists blog. Two qualitative methods were used: content analysis of blog and “about” pages, and in-depth responsive interviews with chemists and physicists who maintain blogs. Analysis of the data yielded several cross-cutting themes that provide a window into how physicists and chemists use their blogs, and what value they receive from maintaining a blog and participating in a blogging community. The article concludes with a discussion of implications for supporting scientists’ work.

Item type: Preprint
Keywords: blogs, social computing, scholarly communication
Subjects: L. Information technology and library technology > LC. Internet, including WWW.
B. Information use and sociology of information > BZ. None of these, but in this section.
L. Information technology and library technology > LJ. Software.
Depositing user: Christina K. Pikas
Date deposited: 11 Mar 2010
Last modified: 02 Oct 2014 12:16
URI: http://hdl.handle.net/10760/14348

References

Abels, E. G., Liebscher, P., & Denman, D. W. (1996). Factors that influence the use of electronic networks by science and engineering faculty at small institutions. Part I. Queries. Journal of the American Society for Information Science, 47, 146-158.

Allen, R. S. (1991). Physics information and scientific communication: Information sources and communication patterns. Science & Technology Libraries, 11(3), 27-38.

Altheide, D. L. (1987). Ethnographic content analysis. Qualitative Sociology, 10(1), 65-77.

Amsen, E. (2006). Who benefits from science blogging? Hypothesis, 4, March 25, 2007. Retrieved March 25, 2007, from http://medbiograd.sa.utoronto.ca/pdfs/vol4num2/10.pdf.

Barjak, F. (2004). On the integration of the internet into informal science communication No. Series A: Discussion Paper DPW 2004-02). Olten, Switzerland: University of Applied Sciences Solothurn Northwest Switzerland. Retrieved from http://www.fhso.ch/pdf/publikationen/dp04-02.pdf

Barjak, F. (2006). The role of the internet in informal scholarly communication. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 57, 1350-1367. DOI:10.1002/asi.20454

Bonetta, L. (2007). Scientists enter the blogosphere. Cell,129, 443-445. DOI:10.1016/j.cell.2007.04.032

Brouwer, D. C., & Squires, C. R. (2003). Public intellectuals, public life, and the university. Argumentation & Advocacy, 39, 201-213.

Carlson, M. (2007). Blogs and journalistic authority. Journalism Studies, 8, 264-279. DOI:10.1080/14616700601148861

Crane, D. (1972). Invisible colleges: Diffusion of knowledge in scientific communities. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Döring, N. (2002). Personal home pages on the web: A review of research. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 7. Retrieved April 10, 2007, from http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol7/issue3/doering.html.

Garvey, W. D., & Griffith, B. C. (1967). Scientific communication as a social system. Science, 157, 1011-1016.

Garvey, W. D., & Griffith, B. C. (1972). Communication and information processing within scientific disciplines - empirical findings for psychology. Information Storage and Retrieval, 8, 123-136.

Glaser, J. (2003). What internet use does and does not change in scientific communities. Science Studies, 16, 38-51.

Golder, S. A., & Donath, J. (2004). Social roles in electronic communities. Paper presented at the Association of Internet Researchers (AoIR) Conference Internet Research 5.0, Brighton, England. Retrieved December 24, 2007, from http://web.media.mit.edu/~golder/projects/roles/golder2004.pdf

Gregg, M. (2006). Feeling ordinary: Blogging as conversational scholarship. Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies, 20, 147-160.

Gresham, J.L., Jr. (1994). From invisible college to cyberspace college: Computer conferencing and the transformation to informal scholarly communication networks. Interpersonal Computing and Technology: An Electronic Journal for the 21st Century, 2, 37-52. Retrieved December 9, 2007, from http://www.helsinki.fi/science/optek/1994/n4/gresham.txt.

Guba, E. G., & Lincoln, Y. S. (1982). Epistemological and methodological bases of naturalistic inquiry. Educational Communication and Technology: A Journal of Theory, Research, and Development, 30, 233-252.

Halavais, A. (2006). Scholarly blogging: Moving toward the visible college. In A. Bruns & J. Jacobs (Eds.), Uses of blogs (pp. 117-126). New York: Peter Lang.

Herring, S. C., Scheidt, L. A., Bonus, S., & Wright, E. (2004). Bridging the gap: A genre analysis of weblogs. Proceedings of the 37th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences- 2004, IV.

Herring, S. C., Scheidt, L. A., Kouper, I., & Wright, E. (2007). Longitudinal content analysis of blogs: 2003-2004. In M. Tremayne (Ed.), Blogging, citizenship, and the future of media. New York: Routledge.

Hesse, B. W., Sproull, L. S., Kiesler, S. B., & Walsh, J. P. (1993). Returns to science: computer networks in oceanography. Communications of the ACM, 36(8), 90-101.

Hsieh, H., & Shannon, S. E. (2005). Three approaches to qualitative content analysis. Qualitative Health Research, 15(9), 1277-1288. DOI:10.1177/1049732305276687

Jones, W. (2007). Personal information management. In B. Cronin (Ed.), Annual review of information science and technology (pp. 453-504). Medford, N.J.: Information Today.

Kaye, J., Vertesi, J., Avery, S., Dafoe, A., David, S., Onaga, L., et al. (2006). To have and to hold: Exploring the personal archive. Paper presented at the Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, Montréal, Québec. 275-284.

Kling, R., & McKim, G. (2000). Not just a matter of time: Field differences and the shaping of electronic media in supporting scientific communication. Journal of the American Society for Information Science, 51(14), 1306-1320.

Kraut, R. E., Egido, C., & Galegher, J. (1990). Patterns of contact and communication in scientific research collaboration. In J. Galegher, R. E. Kraut & C. Egido (Eds.), Intellectual teamwork: Social and technological foundations of cooperative work (pp. 149-171). Hillsdale, N.J.: L. Erlbaum Associates.

Kyvik, S. (2005). Popular science publishing and contributions to public discourse among university faculty. Science Communication, 26, 288-311. DOI: 10.1177/1075547004273022

Lamb, R., & Davidson, E. (2005). Information and communication technology challenges to scientific professional identity. Information Society, 21(1), 1-24.

Lenhart, A., & Fox, S. (2006). Bloggers: A portrait of the internet’s new storytellers. Washington, D.C.: Pew Internet & American Life Project. Retrieved March 20, 2007, from http://www.pewinternet.org/pdfs/PIP%20Bloggers%20Report%20July%2019%202006.pdf.

Maxwell, J. A. (2005). Qualitative research design: An interactive approach (2nd ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.

Mayring, P. (2000). Qualitative content analysis. Forum Qualitative Sozialforschung/Forum: Qualitative Social Research, 1(2), December 9, 2004. Retrieved May 5, 2007, from http://www.qualitative-research.net/fqs-texte/2-00/2-00mayring-e.htm.

Mishne, G. (2007). Using blog properties to improve retrieval. Paper presented at the International Conference on Weblogs and Social Media (ICWSM '07), Boulder, CO. Retrieved April 2, 2007, from http://staff.science.uva.nl/~gilad/pubs/icwsm07-trec.pdf

Mortensen, T., & Walker, J. (2002). Blogging thoughts: Personal publication as an online research tool. In SKIKT-Researchers' Conference 2002: Researching ICTs in Context (pp. 249-279). Oslo: University of Oslo. Retrieved June 1, 2005 from http://www.intermedia.uio.no/konferanser/skikt-02/docs/Researching_ICTs_in_context-Ch11-Mortensen-Walker.pdf.

Myers, G. (2003). Discourse studies of scientific popularization: Questioning the boundaries. Discourse Studies, 5(2), 265-279. DOI: 10.1177/1461445603005002006

Nardi, B. A., Schiano, D. J., Gumbrecht, M., & Swartz, L. (2004). Why we blog. Communications of the ACM, 47(12), 41-46.

Paquet, S. (2002). Personal knowledge publishing and its uses in research. Retrieved March 25, 2007, from http://radio.weblogs.com/0110772/stories/2002/10/03/personalKnowledgePublishingAndItsUsesInResearch.html.

Patton, M. Q. (2002). Qualitative research & evaluation methods (3rd ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.

QSR International Pty Ltd. (2007). NVivo qualitative data analysis software. Version 7.

Rogers, E. M. (2003). Diffusion of innovations (5th ed.). New York: Free Press.

Rojo, A., & Ragsdale, R. G. (1997). A process perspective on participation in scholarly electronic forums. Science Communication, 18(4), 320-341.

Rubin, H. J., & Rubin, I. (2005). Qualitative interviewing: The art of hearing data (2nd ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.

Shankar, K. (2007). Order from chaos: The poetics and pragmatics of scientific recordkeeping. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 58(10), 1457-1466. DOI: 10.1002/asi.20625

Talja, S., Savolainen, R., & Maula, H. (2004). Field differences in the use and perceived usefulness of scholarly mailing lists. Information Research-an International Electronic Journal, 10(1), paper 200. Retrieved March 5, 2006 from http://InformationR.net/ir/10-1/paper200.html.

Trammell, K. D. (2005). Looking at the pieces to understand the whole: An analysis of blog posts, comments, and trackbacks. Conference Papers -- International Communication Association. 1-26.

Walker, J. (2006). Blogging from inside the ivory tower. In A. Bruns & J. Jacobs (Eds.), Uses of blogs (pp. 127-138). New York: Peter Lang.

Walsh, J. P., & Bayma, T. (1996). The virtual college: Computer-mediated communication and scientific work. Information Society, 12(4), 343-363.

Walsh, J. P., & Maloney, N. G. (2002). Computer network use, collaboration structures, and productivity. In P. Hinds & S. Kiesler (Eds.), Distributed work (pp. 433-458). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Weigold, M. F. (2001). Communicating science: A review of the literature. Science Communication, 23(2), 164-193. DOI:10.1177/1075547001023002005

White, M. D., & Marsh, E. E. (2006). Content analysis: A flexible methodology. Library Trends, 55(1), 22-45.


Downloads

Downloads per month over past year

Actions (login required)

View Item View Item