This article provides the first historical analysis of the relationship between collaboration and scientific impact using three indicators of collaboration (number of authors, number of addresses, and number of countries) derived from articles published between 1900 and 2011. The results demonstrate that an increase in the number of authors leads to an increase in impact, from the beginning of the last century onward, and that this is not due simply to self‐citations. A similar trend is also observed for the number of addresses and number of countries represented in the byline of an article. However, the constant inflation of collaboration since 1900 has resulted in diminishing citation returns: Larger and more diverse (in terms of institutional and country affiliation) teams are necessary to realize higher impact. The article concludes with a discussion of the potential causes of the impact gain in citations of collaborative papers.

The recent interest in Big Data has generated a broad range of new academic, corporate, and policy practices along with an evolving debate amongst its proponents, detractors, and skeptics. While the practices draw on a common set of tools, techniques, and technologies, most contributions to the debate come either from a particular disciplinary perspective or with an eye on a domain-specific issue. A close examination of these contributions reveals a set of common problematics that arise in various guises in different places. It also demonstrates the need for a critical synthesis of the conceptual and practical dilemmas surrounding Big Data. The purpose of this article is to provide such a synthesis by drawing on relevant writings in the sciences, humanities, policy, and trade literature. In bringing these diverse literatures together, we aim to shed light on the common underlying issues that concern and affect all of these areas. By contextualizing the phenomenon of Big Data within larger socio-economic developments, we also seek to provide a broader understanding of its drivers, barriers, and challenges. This approach allows us to identify attributes of Big Data that need to receive more attentionautonomy, opacity, and generativity, disparity, and futurity -leading to questions and ideas for moving beyond dilemmas.

This brief communication presents preliminary findings on automated Twitter accounts distributing links to scientific papers deposited on the preprint repository arXiv. It discusses the implication of the presence of such bots from the perspective of social media metrics (altmetrics), where mentions of scholarly documents on Twitter have been suggested as a means of measuring impact that is both broader and timelier than citations. We present preliminary findings that automated Twitter accounts create a considerable amount of tweets to scientific papers and that they behave differently than common social bots, which has critical implications for the use of raw tweet counts in research evaluation and assessment. We discuss some definitions of Twitter cyborgs and bots in scholarly communication and propose differentiating between different levels of engagement from tweeting only bibliographic information to discussing or commenting on the content of a paper.

The TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) conference and associated website of recorded conference presentations (TED Talks) is a highly successful disseminator of science-related videos, claiming over a billion online views. Although hundreds of scientists have presented at TED, little information is available regarding the presenters, their academic credentials, and the impact of TED Talks on the general population. This article uses bibliometric and webometric techniques to gather data on the characteristics of TED presenters and videos and analyze the relationship between these characteristics and the subsequent impact of the videos. The results show that the presenters were predominately male and non-academics. Male-authored videos were more popular and more liked when viewed on YouTube. Videos by academic presenters were more commented on than videos by others and were more liked on YouTube, although there was little difference in how frequently they were viewed. The majority of academic presenters were senior faculty, males, from United States-based institutions, were visible online, and were cited more frequently than average for their field. However, giving a TED presentation appeared to have no impact on the number of citations subsequently received by an academic, suggesting that although TED popularizes research, it may not promote the work of scientists within the academic community.

The TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) Talks website hosts video recordings of various experts, celebrities, academics, and others who discuss their topics of expertise. Funded by advertising and members but provided free online, TED Talks have been viewed over a billion times and are a science communication phenomenon. Although the organization has been derided for its populist slant and emphasis on entertainment value, no previous research has assessed audience reactions in order to determine the degree to which presenter characteristics and platform affect the reception of a video. This article addresses this issue via a content analysis of comments left on both the TED website and the YouTube platform (on which TED Talks videos are also posted). It was found that commenters were more likely to discuss the characteristics of a presenter on YouTube, whereas commenters tended to engage with the talk content on the TED website. In addition, people tended to be more emotional when the speaker was a woman (by leaving comments that were either positive or negative). The results can inform future efforts to popularize science amongst the public, as well as to provide insights for those looking to disseminate information via Internet videos.