Book reviews

The Future of Scholarly Communication Deborah Shorley and Michael Jubb London, Facet, 2013, 224pp. ISBN: 978‐1‐85604‐817‐0, £49.95 (pbk)     

New ways of building,showcasing, and measuring scholarly reputation

The article reports on a study of the views and actions of nearly a hundred scholars – mostly academic researchers from four European countries and four disciplines – in regard to scholarly reputation in the Science 2.0 age. It specifically looks at the role that 'emerging reputational mechanisms and platforms are playing in building, maintaining, and showcasing scholarly reputation in the digital age. Popular examples of such platforms are ResearchGate and Academia.edu . Data were obtained through one‐to‐one interviews and focus groups, supported by desk research. The main findings were: (a) it is early days and uptake is light and patchy with platforms largely used for non‐reputational purposes, such as sharing documents; (b) most users were passive and did not fully engage with the social aspects of the platforms; (c) the reputational focus was very much on just one scholarly activity (research), on just two outputs of that activity (publications and conferences) and one measurement of that activity (citations), but there are the stirrings of change; (d) young researchers are set to profit most from the emerging platforms.     

Slowness as a Virtue

This essay explores three practices commonly discussed in relation to each other: slow writing, slow reading and slow philosophy. These have close connections, and all of these are joined by practices of philosophical teaching and dialogue, which can also be carried out in a ‘slow’ manner. ‘Slow’ here means careful, deliberate and perspicacious—which might be said to be the prime virtues of philosophy. In this essay I want to explore what slowness means in the context of our intellectual work, concluding that slowness can be seen as a kind of virtue. Like other virtues (for example, honesty), more and more of a good thing is not always for the better. One can be too slow, just as one can be too fast, and part of the enactment of this quality entails discernment in judging what kind of slowness, and how much slowness, is suited to a particular task. Context matters, and our choices about slowness need to be viewed in relation to specific circumstances.     

Book Reviews

Information Users and Usability in the Digital Age Chowdhury and Chowdhury Facet, 2011, 304pp. ISBN: 978‐1‐85604‐597‐1, £44.95 (pbk) Interactive Information Seeking, Behaviour and Retrieval Ruthven and Kelly Facet, 2011, 320pp. ISBN: 978‐1856047074, £44.95 (pbk)     

‘Reading’ in the digital environment

For ten years CIBER has been studying the logs of scholarly publishers, and what was clear from the very beginning was that scholars conducted very brief visits to websites and spent very little time reading when there, yet publishers envisaged they would dwell; and if not dwell, then at least deep read the PDF later. Yet CIBER's research points to the fact that ‘lite’ reading is in fact endemic: younger people prefer it anyway and older people are getting used to it for the speed and convenience it brings. PDFs are largely a means of archiving and collecting and are not the gold standard reading metric people think. User satisfaction comes not from a PDF but from the ability to deep dive into a site and snatch what you are interested as quickly as possible. Publishers are still not comfortable with that and this article helps explain why they have to be.     

Evaluating information seeking and use in the changing virtual world: the emerging role of Google Analytics

The paper identifies changes that have occurred in the Web environment over the last decade which have gradually rendered server logs, once the preeminent source of intelligence on usage and information‐seeking behaviour, an ineffective, impractical, and uneconomic resource. It also looks at the implications of these changes for information professionals and publishers who have come to rely on this data to understand the behaviour of clients and customers in the virtual environment. Ubiquitous and expanding, Google Analytics generates statistics about a website's traffic and traffic sources, albeit from a marketers' perspective, is evaluated as a possible replacement; something which might plug the user knowledge gap which is worryingly opening up, or maybe even, put us in a better position overall. The paper is built on the knowledge and experience of evaluating server logs for more than a decade, mostly for publishers and libraries, and also on two recent projects where server log analysis was supplemented with Google Analytics.     

Social media use in the research workflow

The paper reports on a major international survey, covering 2,000 researchers, which investigated the use of social media in the research workflow. The topic is the second to emerge from the Charleston Observatory, the research adjunct of the popular annual Charleston Conference ( http://www.katina.info/conference/ ). The study shows that social media have found serious application at all points of the research lifecycle, from identifying research opportunities to disseminating findings at the end. The three most popular social media tools in a research setting were those for collaborative authoring, conferencing, and scheduling meetings. The most popular brands used tend to be mainstream anchor technologies or ‘household brands‘, such as Twitter. Age is a poor predictor of social media use in a research context, and humanities and social science scholars avail themselves most of social media. Journals, conference proceedings, and edited books remain the core traditional means of disseminating research, with institutional repositories highly valued as well, but social media have become important complementary channels for disseminating and discovering research.