Metadata Requirements for Repositories in Health Informatics Research: Evidence from the Analysis of Social Media Citations

Abstract

Δημοσιεύσεις Μελών—ΣΔΟ – Βιβλιοθηκονομίας και Συστημάτων Πληροφόρησης, 2013Social media have transformed the way modern science is communicated. Although several studies have been focused on the use of social media for the dissemination of scientific knowledge and the measurement of the impact of academic output, we know very little about how academics cite social media in their publications. In order to address this gap, a content analysis was performed on a sample of 629 journal articles in medical informatics. The findings showed the presence of 109 citations to social media resources, the majority of which were blogs and wikis. Social media citations were used more frequently to support the literature review section of articles. However, a fair amount of citations was used in order to document various aspects of the methodology section, such as the data collection and analysis process. The paper concludes with the implications of these findings for metadata design for bibliographic databases (like PubMed and Medline)

Scholarly use of social media and altmetrics: A review of the literature

“…ResearchGate—a popular academic social networking site—has been called a “source of stress” (Van Noorden, , p. 128), Facebook was referred to as having “zero credibility” (Van Noorden, , p. 129), and blogs have been described as waste of time because of the lack of peer review (Harley, Acord, Earl‐Novell, Lawrence, & King, ). Despite these concerns, there is considerable evidence of the increased use of social media for scholarly communication purposes (Moran, Seaman, & Tinti‐Kane, ; e.g., Ponte & Simon, ; Rousidis, Garoufallou, & Balatsoukas, ; Tenopir et al, ) and acceptance of these new forms of diffusion (Piwowar, ; Viney, ; Wilsdon et al, ).…”

“…Despite this, contribution rates remain low-likely hindered by the lack of explicit authorship in Wikipedia, a cornerstone of the traditional academic reward system (Black, 2008;Butler, 2008;Callaway, 2010;Whitworth & Friedman, 2009). Citations to scholarly documents-another critical component in the reward system-are increasingly being found in Wikipedia entries (Bould et al, 2014;Park, 2011;Rousidis et al, 2013), but are not yet seen as valid impact indicators (Haustein, Peters, Bar-Ilan, et al, 2014).…”

“…Although most scholars do not create content on Wikipedia (Procter et al, 2010b), it is increasingly cited, both in journal articles (Rousidis et al, 2013) and in scholarly blog posts (Weller & Peters, 2012). The percentage of articles cited by Wikipedia pages remains low: the few studies of coverage of articles in Wikipedia have shown rates of coverage around 1% (Alperin, 2014(Alperin, , 2015Zahedi, Costas, & Wouters, 2014b), though the rate of coverage is slightly higher in the case of computer science (3%) (Shuai, Jiang, Liu, & Bollen, 2013) and PLOS papers (~5%) (Fenner, 2014;Lin & Fenner, 2014;Priem, Piwowar, et al, 2012).…”

Metadata for Big Data: A preliminary investigation of metadata quality issues in research data repositories

“…The main issues were that the elements should be populated and used correctly, while precise instructions, descriptions and rules should be set. In addition to general metadata standards, like Dublin Core, researchers have examined metadata quality in the context of specialized repositories, such as architectural repositories [15]; digital libraries [20]; agricultural collections [23]; health databases [16]; and learning object repositories [14]. Despite the heterogeneity of metadata and repositories examined in these studies, there is a common set of metadata issues that appears to influence quality.…”