Burnett's (2000) typology of information exchange in virtual communities attempts to provide a framework for examining the range of activities undertaken by participants in such communities. This study is the first in a series to apply the typology to specific virtual communities, in an effort to assess its accuracy against the day‐to‐day interactions to be found in two online communities. Through a comparison of these two communities using the typology, revisions to the typology are proposed which will allow it to reflect more accurately activities found within the communities. By providing a metric through which to address such questions, the revised typology will allow a richer understanding of virtual communities as social information environments.

Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS) is a progressively debilitating neuro-degenerative condition that occurs in adulthood and targets the motor neurons. Social support is crucial to the well-being and quality of life of people with unpredictable and incurable diseases such as ALS.Members of the PatientsLikeMe (PLM) ALS online support community share social support but 2 also exchange and build distributed knowledge within their discussion forum. This qualitative analysis of 1000 posts from the PLM ALS online discussion examines the social support within the PLM ALS online community, and explores ways community members share and build knowledge.The analysis responds to three research questions: RQ1: How and why is knowledge shared among the distributed participants in the PLM-ALS threaded discussion forum?; RQ2: How do the participants in the PLM ALS threaded discussion forum work together to discover knowledge about treatments and to keep knowledge discovered over time?; and RQ3: How do participants in the PLM-ALS forum co-create and treat authoritative knowledge from multiple sources including the medical literature, health care professionals, lived experiences of patients and "other" sources of information such as lay literature and alternative health providers? The findings have implications for supporting knowledge sharing and discovery in addition to social support for patients.

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1 Although there are a number of ways in which in which to discuss "normative," this theory was designed to describe a typical and natural way of relating to a norm or standard of conduct. Thus, we do not make reference to the many other ways in which the term has been used.

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The production of scientific knowledge has evolved from a process of inquiry largely based on the activities of individual scientists to one grounded in the collaborative efforts of specialized research teams. This shift brings to light a new question: how the composition of scientific teams affects their production of knowledge. This study employs data from 1,415 experiments conducted at the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory (NHMFL) between 2005 and 2008 to identify and select a sample of 89 teams and examine whether team diversity and network characteristics affect productivity.The study examines how the diversity of science teams along several variables affects overall team productivity. Results indicate several diversity measures associated with network position and team productivity. Teams with mixed institutional associations were more central to the overall network compared with teams that primarily comprised NHMFL's own scientists. Team cohesion was positively related to productivity. The study indicates that high productivity in teams is associated with high disciplinary diversity and low seniority diversity of team membership. Finally, an increase in the share of senior members negatively affects productivity, and teams with members in central structural positions perform better than other teams.

This study investigates motivations for self‐archiving research items on academic social networking sites (ASNSs). A model of these motivations was developed based on two existing motivation models: motivation for self‐archiving in academia and motivations for information sharing in social media. The proposed model is composed of 18 factors drawn from personal, social, professional, and external contexts, including enjoyment, personal/professional gain, reputation, learning, self‐efficacy, altruism, reciprocity, trust, community interest, social engagement, publicity, accessibility, self‐archiving culture, influence of external actors, credibility, system stability, copyright concerns, additional time, and effort. Two hundred and twenty‐six ResearchGate users participated in the survey. Accessibility was the most highly rated factor, followed by altruism, reciprocity, trust, self‐efficacy, reputation, publicity, and others. Personal, social, and professional factors were also highly rated, while external factors were rated relatively low. Motivations were correlated with one another, demonstrating that RG motivations for self‐archiving could increase or decrease based on several factors in combination with motivations from the personal, social, professional, and external contexts. We believe the findings from this study can increase our understanding of users' motivations in sharing their research and provide useful implications for the development and improvement of ASNS services, thereby attracting more active users.

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