The aims of this study are to answer the following questions:
* are social media impacting upon researcher workflows?
* if so, how should publishers and librarians respond?
* how influential are age and other factors in shaping the demand for social media?
Digital media and the Internet are transforming how young people learn, play, socialize, and participate in civic life. A newly-created Digital Media and Learning Research Hub located at the University of California-Irvine will provide an international center to nurture exploration of and build evidence around the impact of digital media on young people's learning and its potential for transforming education. Funded through a $2.97 million grant from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the Center was announced today at a national forum at Google headquarters that brought together leading thinkers around the challenge of reasserting American global leadership in education.
A research paper considers new scientists' publishing and presentation activities using blogs, websites, and social media in the context of the scientific publishing enterprise.
Abstract: "By analyzing six different event-centric datasets of resources shared in social media in the period from June 2009 to March 2012, we found about 11% lost and 20% archived after just a year and an average of 27% lost and 41% archived after two and a half years. Furthermore, we found a nearly linear relationship between time of sharing of the resource and the percentage lost, with a slightly less linear relationship between time of sharing and archiving coverage of the resource. From this model we conclude that after the first year of publishing, nearly 11% of shared resources will be lost and after that we will continue to lose 0.02% per day." Wonder how this compares with some of the "linkrot" or disappearing web resource links studies in the '00s?
"The term "altmetrics" is short for "alternative metrics." These are a range of nontraditional metrics that can be used to assess the impact that scholars have on research in their areas of study. They can include the number of article downloads, citation of research in online news/social media sources, Mendeley bookmarks (a web-based system for sharing and extracting information from PDFs and other electronic documents), and nontraditional forms of scholarship. "