Trends in Scholarly Use of Online Social Media
Date
2011-01-04
Authors
Gruzd, Anatoliy
Staves, Kathleen
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Position paper presented at the Workshop on Changing Dynamics of Scientific Collaboration, the 44th Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS), January 4-7, 2011, Kauai, HI, USA.
Abstract
Description
As online social media sites rapidly become more mainstream, numerous studies have been
conducted on how the public is using these technologies; however, there is still scant research into how
scholars are using these technologies. To address this gap, we are conducting a comprehensive study to
find out if, how, and why scholars are using social media for knowledge and information dissemination
(KID). In this research, we address six main questions: 1) Why are scholars starting to rely on these
new media? 2) What is the geographical reach of these media? 3) What is the actual adoption rate for
these media among scholars? 4) What is the perceived, actual and potential utility of these media in the
context of KID? 5) Do these media help to improve KID? 6) Do these media help or hinder the ability
of researchers to publish or present their work in more traditional media such as journals and
conferences? This position paper is a starting point in our research. This preliminary literature review
will list some of the social media tools that have been adopted by scholars and how scholar are
currently using them in their work.
Keywords
social media, academia, social networking, web 2.0, scholars