Academia as X Factor

There is an interesting snippet in the Times Higher Education of November, 2011 by John Elmes. He is reporting on an experiment carried out by Melissa Terras from University College London where she uploads one paper a week to her institutional repository and then tweets and blogs about it (Melissa Terras Blog). She writes "prior to me blogging and tweeting about the paper it got downloaded twice (not by me). The day I tweeted and blogged, it immediately got 140 downloads. This was on a Friday: on the Saturday and Sunday it got downloaded but by fewer people - on Monday it was retweeted and it got a further 140 downloads. I have no idea what happened on 24 October (Monday) - someone must have linked to it? Posted it on a blog? Then there were a further 80 downloads and then it went quiet". She says this can lead to your statistics becoming an obsession and it also may be the drift towards "academia as X-Factor". Whatever the pros and cons it does show the impact of the use of social media.

Survey of Russell Group University use of Google Scholar Citations

There is an interesting post on UK WEB focus (written by Brian Kelly) of a survey carried out in the Russel Group Universities in the UK about their use of Google Scholar Citations
http://ukwebfocus.wordpress.com/2011/11/24/surveying-russell-group-university-use-of-google-scholar-citations/
This raises some interesting questions about whether researchers are being proactive in claiming profiles in order to publicise their work and what happens in the case of those who may have passed away and cannot verify their Google account.

Google Citations

Yesterday (Nov. 17, 2011) Google released Google Citations to the general public. This is a simple way for authors to collect their articles together, gather the citations and track them over time. Definitely worth a look as it is also gathering material from Arrow@dit. More information from the Google Scholar Blog http://googlescholar.blogspot.com/2011/11/google-scholar-citations-open-to-all.html