Year: 2013
Type: conference-paper
Abstract: The broad aim of the paper is to examine how emerging digital behaviours are challenging and, perhaps, changing concepts of trust and authority in the scholarly world. How researchers assign and calibrate authority and trustworthiness to the scholarly sources and channels they choose to use, cite and publish is discussed. Sources/channels like journals, websites, datasets, and social media. In particular how researchers are coping in today’s crowded, dynamic, diverse and dis-intermediated digital scholarly environment where it is ever more difficult to establish the quality, veracity, authorship and authority of information is looked at. Examining also whether the growth in the use of social media and open access publications for scholarly purposes impacts on conventional practices of establishing the authority and trustworthiness of information sources and channels. \nThe overall study is international, although the emphasis of this paper is on the situation in the USA and UK and the study also focuses mainly on science and social science. Three methodologies (focus groups, critical incident interviews and questionnaires) were used in the broader study, but here we concentrate on the results of the focus groups, the first methodology to be employed. \nThe findings show that the traditional trust measures – peer-reviewed journals, impact factors and personal knowledge and networks – are still very much in place, although social media is making some headway with early career researchers.
Author: David Nicholas
Language: English
Subfield: Statistics, Probability and Uncertainty
Field: Decision Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W348237096