Social Media for Academics. A Practical Guide

241 Pages·2012·16.05 MB·English

by  Diane Rasmussen Neal (Eds.)

Social Media for Academics
CHANDOS
SOCIAL MEDIA SERIES
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This series of books is aimed at practitioners and academics involved in using social
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Social Media for
Academics
A practical guide
EDITED BY
D R N
IANE ASMUSSEN EAL
Oxford Cambridge New Delhi
Chandos Publishing
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First published in 2012
ISBN: 978-1-84334-681-4 (print)
ISBN: 978-1-78063-319-0 (online)
Chandos Social Media Series ISSN: 2050-6813 (print) and ISSN: 2050-6821 (online)
© The editor and contributors, 2012
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data.
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The publishers make no representation, express or implied, with regard to the accuracy of the
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any errors or omissions.
The material contained in this publication constitutes general guidelines only and does not
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Printed in the UK and USA.
List of figures and tables
Figures
I.1 Facebook status xxv
2.1 AcademiaMap.com interface 25
2.2 Google+ circles, a feature that allows users to manually
organize their contacts into groups 27
2.3 ResearchGate: recommendation page of researchers
with similar research 29
2.4 ResearchGate: topic page on Open Source Scientific
Software (OSSS) 30
2.5 Academia.edu: profile page 31
2.6 Academia.edu: visitors’ statistics dashboard 32
2.7 rDmap for discovering collaborators and potential
supervisors 34
3.1 Digital scholarship: be online or be irrelevant 40
3.2 Using hangouts for collaborative writing 44
3.3 Google Docs as a means for team writing, editing and
commenting 46
4.1 Timeline of the release of online academic search engines 61
4.2 Web of Science citation report for the paper, As we
may think, by Vannevar Bush 63
4.3 Web of Science interactive hyperbolic visualization of
the forward and backward citation of a paper by
Henry G. Small 64
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Social Media for Academics
4.4 Scopus search interface showing searchable metadata
fields 66
4.5 Example of a citation analysis in the Google Scholar gadget 69
4.6 Example of a Google Scholar public profile 70
4.7 Display of results of an author search in Academic
Search 71
4.8 Academic Search’s co-citation, co-author path and
citation graph for Henry G. Small 72
4.9 Rich searchable metadata options in Scirus 74
4.10 Scopus bibliometric visualizations: 1) h-index graph
of 7 documents with self-citations removed, and
2) the SNIP (contextual citation impact) analysis
of four journals 76
4.11 Web of Science options for filtering search results 78
4.12 Results of Web of Science query passed through to
Scientific WebPlus 79
5.1 Zotero tag cloud 92
5.2 Zotero’s main page 94
5.3 Mendeley’s dashboard 96
5.4 CiteULike’s portal page 99
5.5 Connotea’s library view 100
7.1 Scanning pattern of one-dimensional vs. two-dimensional
barcodes 130
7.2 RedLaser QR code scanner in use 134
8.1 Edmodo, a ‘social’ LMS 149
8.2 Mentoring service for first-year undergraduate students 150
8.3 A new information resource – Wiki: ECM in the
cloud 153
8.4 Online presentation and peer evaluation 154
8.5 Elements of a student digital poster in a virtual
conference 157
9.1 Search result list for ‘Diane Rasmussen Neal’ on
google.ca 169
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List of figures and tables
9.2 Google Scholar results for ‘Diane Rasmussen Neal’ 170
10.1 Top ten social networking sites by market share,
August 2011 185
10.2 Instant personalization 186
Tables
3.1 A comparison of web-based collaborative writing tools 45
8.1 List of elements and tools incorporated into a digital
poster presentation at a virtual conference 156
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Acknowledgements
Because social media inherently involves connections to people, it amazes
me to think about all the communities and individuals who have
contributed to my expertise in this area as well as to the daily
developments in the industry. I must thank first the people I talked to on
Bulletin Board Systems, Usenet and ICQ that I accessed on campus as an
undergraduate and with my noisy dial-up modem at home. I also thank
the colleagues I worked with at the Central Texas Library System and
the Northeast Texas Library System five or six years ago, who gave me
numerous opportunities to train library staff on the powers and
challenges of implementing social media in libraries. Currently, my
colleagues and administrators at the Faculty of Information and Media
Studies at The University of Western Ontario provide the perfect balance
of professional autonomy and support so that I can teach social media
classes with the pedagogical strategies that I choose as well as perform
empirical research into this new age of communication. The American
Society for Information Science and Technology, my professional home,
has been a source of ideas surrounding social media development for
many years now. Robert Foster, a Master of Library and Information
Science student in my faculty and a student on two of my past courses,
supplied encouraging editorial assistance as well as half of this book’s
final chapter. I must also thank the other authors of this book for their
high-quality content. Finally, thanks go out to my friends and family for
their loving support, although they do not all understand why I check my
social media accounts every day, even on holidays!
xv
About the editor
Diane Rasmussen Neal is an Assistant Professor in the Faculty of
Information and Media Studies at The University of Western Ontario,
and she holds the permanent title of Visiting Scholar at The University
of Sydney in Sydney, Australia. She earned her information science
degrees (MS 2001, Ph.D. 2006) from the University of North Texas.
Additionally, she has been a systems librarian and a corporate information
technology professional. Diane serves as an elected Director-at-Large
(2012–14) of the American Society for Information Science and
Technology (ASIS&T). Since 2007, she has taught professional workshops
and university courses on the use of social media in libraries and other
non-profit settings. Her research areas include analysing users’ tagging
of photographs and music as well as developing engaging, effective
online mental health information resources for emerging adults. She has
published in many peer-reviewed journals, including the Journal of the
Medical Library Association, Library & Information Science Research,
the Journal of Information Science, Knowledge Organization, and the
Journal of Library Metadata. Her other new edited volume, Indexing
and Retrieval of Non-text Information, will be published by DeGruyter
Saur in 2012. A lifelong gamer and a haphazard blogger since 2005, she
is currently the co-editor of the blog ‘tl-dr.ca: where games and
information collide’.
xvii
About the contributors
Adam Craig is a recent graduate of the Master of Library and Information
Science programme at The University of Western Ontario and has a
background in philosophy. Currently working as a branch manager in
the Essex County Library system, his research interests include teen
information literacy and best practices for library marketing and
outreach. Adam is an active blogger and performer in the Windsor and
Essex County music community.
David J. Fiander is the Web Services Librarian at The University of
Western Ontario, where he has worked since 2000. David holds a
Bachelor of Maths degree from the University of Waterloo and a Masters
of Library and Information Science degree from the University of
Western Ontario. At Western, David is responsible for the library’s
website and for tracking emerging technologies. David was a software
developer for over a decade before becoming a librarian. He is active in
the open source software development community, and has contributed
to both the Evergreen and Koha ILS projects.
Robert Foster is a Master of Library and Information Science student in
the Faculty of Information and Media Studies at The University of
Western Ontario. He holds a Bachelor of Arts in Political Science degree
from McMaster University. Robert’s career has included over 20 years as
a project management and information technology professional, having
achieved a Project Management Professional (PMP) designation. He also
has an active interest in politics, having been elected four times as a
municipal councillor in the town of Lincoln, Ontario.
Anatoliy Gruzd is Director of the Social Media Lab at Dalhousie
University and an Assistant Professor in the School of Information
Management in the Faculty of Management and the Faculty of Computer
Science where he teaches Information Policy, Information Management
Systems, Digital Libraries, Data Mining, User Experience and Beyond
Google. Dr Gruzd’s current research explores how online social media
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