1 - Google and the Web

The open web – search for the kakapo

Click on some of these links. How useful would they be in carrying out research on the kakapo?

The Kakapo Recovery Programme

The Fabulous Kakapo

The Kakapo on Wikipedia

TerraNature

Stuff

Cockrem et al.

Kakapo Tweets

Sirocco on Youtube

Kakapo Images on Flickr

Kakapo on Kiwi Research Information Service (KRIS)

Kakapo on Google Scholar

Kakapo on Google Book Search (Limited Preview and Full Text)

Google is an enormous index of the Internet - not all of it but a pretty major proportion. It is created by a process called "spidering", whereby a piece of software "crawls" across websites on a regular basis and creates a giant index of all the words it finds. We are then able to find matches for words or combinations of words we enter.

1 a - Basic Google AND search

We are used to searching Google by just throwing words into it.

Click on the graphic to run the search

We put in three words and Google gives us back links to web pages that contain these words, with highly relevant ones at the top. We might recognise the same form of Boolean logic as that used by database searches - Google has actually searched for kin AND recognition AND rodents but we don't need to explicitly use the AND operator.

1 b - Phrases and OR searching

Quote marks can be used to force Google to search for a phrase rather than ANDing words. Compare the different results you get from these two searches. The first is a phrase from a well-known New Zealand poem entered without quotes

Click to run

And here is the same phrase entered with quote marks

Click to run

We can use the OR operator. Here is a search for kin OR relatedness recognition OR discrimination rodents OR squirrels OR chipmunks. Note that the OR operator must be in upper-case.

Click to run

1 c - Open results in windows or tabs

By right-clicking we can open search results in different windows or tabs - this relieves us from a lot of back-arrowing and gives us the chance to compare different results pages.

Click to run

Clicking on the mouse wheel automatically opens the link in a new tab or window.

1 d - Exercise

Choose one topic from the list below and search it on Google using at least one OR.

• The effects of lunar phases on our behaviour
• Does self esteem affect academic performance?
• Do fish recognise their kin?
• Oral communication in the workplace
• Are our memories of childhood accurate?
• Efficacy studies of folk remedies
• Implications of Coastal sand mining in New Zealand
• The integration of teenage children of immigrant families into New Zealand society
• Illness in Wuthering Heights

1 e - Advanced Google Searching

We can use the Advanced Search option to specify what sorts of websites our results come from. Here's a search on mate selection in birds

Click to run

If we click on the Advanced Search option and then enter ac.nz into the Search within a site or domain box we find only pages from New Zealand sites, in other words those that have ac.nz as part of their web address.

By clicking on Date, usage rights, numeric range, and more you can access more options. In this case we are able to choose sites that allow us to make use of their content. We could also choose to search recently-updated sites only.

1 f - Exercise

Find web pages on a topic of interest on New Zealand (ac.nz) and Australian (edu.au) academic sites.

The Wikipedia list of domains (top level and country) is a useful guide but does not include the ac academic domain which is used in New Zealand (ac.nz) and the UK (ac.uk).

Next Module – Search Engines

2 - Search engines

2 a - Google

Over the past ten years Google has come to dominate the search engine market because of its ability to return accurate and instant answers to questions. For example

Click on graphics to open searches

The exact workings of the famous Google PageRank algorithm are a trade secret and it changes constantly, but it is based on a calculation of the number of other web pages that link to a given page. It was developed at Stanford University in the 1990s by Ph.D. students Larry Page and Sergey Brin, who were in turn influenced by the citation counting technology developed by Eugene Garfield in the 1960s and which is used in the Web of Science database.

Just like a database Google works by finding terms you have entered. Although there are special "metadata" tags attached to web pages Google actually indexes the first 10,000 or so words on a page meaning that you can track down a phrase or name no matter how obscurely it is buried. Generally variant word endings are also searched and a spell check alerts you to typos!

2 b - Some special Google searches

We will be looking at Google Scholar and Google Book Search later but it is worth having a look at some of the specialised searches and services available through the more link.

Alerts allow you to be emailed as new material of interest is found by Google.

Earth requires a software download and then gives you satellite images of almost anywhere in the world.

Finance gives you business news and information.

Images allow you to search and download images from web pages.

Maps allow you to search maps and find directions.

News allows you to search stories from thousands of newspapers and other sources.

2 c - Other search engines

Google is not the only search engine in widespread use and if you wished to be sure you have searched the "whole web" you should use others as well. University of California Berkeley Library has a useful discussion of the operations and advantages of the major search engines. You can also use a meta-search engine like the unfortunately-named Dogpile or the classier Copernic or search.com. By and large, however, Google does the job and meta-search engines are not generally recommended.

For searching images the web 2.0 power of Flickr outperforms Google Images. Searching on mate selection in birds compare the Flickr results with those from Google Images.

There are other search engines like SearchNZ and Yahoo Australia & NZ and more recently Wolfram Alpha and Microsoft Bing have appeared to challenge Google's monopoly.

Wolfram Alpha is a “computational search engine” and does quite a neat job of answering the question “Where is Samoan spoken?” Read the article Stephen Wolfram: Can he topple Google? You can also check out the comparative performances of Bing and Google in an actual search.

2d – At the movies

Movie Review Query Engine

Rotten Tomatoes

The Internet Movie Database

If you know of other good ones please leave a comment.

Next Module - Gateways

3 – Gateways

A gateway or directory is a list of web resources. To some extent they have been superseded by search engines, but because the links in a directory will have been deliberately chosen by someone they can still be a valuable means of accessing high quality materials.

3 a - Massey Subject Guides

The Subject Guides on the Massey Library web page are a good example of a gateway

The History and Politics Guide contains advice on locating library resources, as well as links to subscribed reference works and open web sites.

3 b - Te Puna Web Directory and DigitalNZ

The National Library of New Zealand's Te Puna Web Directory is another good example.

It can be browsed

or searched

Although it looks more like a Search Engine I have included DigitalNZ among the directories because it searches a defined set of digital resources.

3 c - Other directories

There are fewer directories on the web than there were a few years ago, and even Google have recently closed theirs. The Internet Public Library still does a good job of bringing together a large amount of "trusted" information.

The Scholarly Societies Project of the University of Waterloo is well worth checking out for a list of academic organisations. It has a good, although not comprehensive, list of New Zealand societies. The Scholarly Societies Project has not been updated since 2009, but they have adopted a policy of listing only those societies with stable domain names.

A pretty reliable one is Arts and Letters Daily (founded by the late Denis Dutton of the University of Canterbury and sponsored by the Chronicle of Higher Education) which in addition to sampling interesting web articles and reviews contains an extensive list of newspapers, magazines and blogs.

Next Module – Some Academic Web Geography

4 - A little scholarly web geography

4 a - The open web

The web pages we find when we search Google are generally accessible to all users of the Internet. They have typically been placed there by

• private individuals
• commercial organisations
• political organisations
• non-government organisations
• educational institutions
• governments
• media organisations

Reasons for making material freely available vary also

• public service
• social cooperation and networking
• commercial promotion or marketing
• public education
• social or political advocacy

4 b - Scholarly information

Written information that is produced by, and used in, the research process has certain typical characteristics

• it is the work of clearly identified individuals and groups
• it has (or should have) undergone stringent quality control and editing processes
• it continues to inhabit a structured hierarchy of documents with journal articles generally at the apex
• unlike other web sources it is supposed to be "immutable" - a "version of record" should exist
• consequently it makes very strong truth claims
• it is generally copyrighted and access to it may be restricted to licensed users

Next Module – Open Access Publishing

5 - Open access publishing and institutional repositories

5 a - Open access journals

One response to the high cost of journal subscriptions has been the open access publishing model. Peer-reviewed journals, some of them quite prestigious, are made freely available over the Internet with the costs of peer-reviewing and publishing carried by the authors or their host institutions.

While many open access journals are relatively small "shoestring" operations some open access publishers have developed into major operations putting out highly-regarded titles. For example PLOS Biology (Public Library of Science) is the most highly-cited journal in the area of general biology while many of the journals in the BioMedCentral collection have very respectable rankings in their respective fields.

5 b - Article processing charges

The downside of open access publishing from an author's point of view is the "article-processing charge" - for the journal BMC Anesthesiology this is currently £1175 (around $NZ2,400). While it has been of great benefit to libraries and non-affiliated researchers open access publishing may tend to favour well-established researchers and those from well-heeled institutions.

In addition to wholly open access journals some commercially published titles such as Molecular Biology and Evolution allow authors to designate their own articles as open access on payment of a fee. Springer Publishers operate a system known as Open Choice across all of their titles which allows authors to pay for their articles to be made open access while Oxford Journals have a substantial number of optional (author pays) journals and a small number of full open access titles.

5 c - Wholly free titles

Many of the original Internet-only journals started by universities and groups of scholars in the 1990s did not continue, but with strong institutional support and well-developed and committed scholarly communities some open-access journals such as the Journal of Universal Computer Science are able to maintain a respectable academic standing without either subscriptions or article-processing fees.

5 d - Funding body support

There is considerable support for open access publishing from research funding bodies. In the United States the National Institute of Health open access policy requires that journal articles reporting research they have funded be placed in the PubMed Central digital archive within twelve months of publication. In the UK The Engineering and Physical sciences Research Council announced their Policy on Access to Research Outputs in January 2009.

In some countries additional money is built into research grants to cover the article processing costs of open access publishing.

5 e - Exercise

Use The Directory of Open Access Journals to find a journal in your own area and find out what the conditions of submission are.

5 f - Institutional repositories

Another response to the high cost of academic journals has been the growth of institutional digital repositories. Many universities and other organisations have begun to create openly-accessible collections of their published research to promote both their own profiles and the public good. Although copyright has generally been assigned to commercial publishers most of them will allow their articles to appear in repositories providing the version used is not the formally published one. The SHERPA/RoMEO website maintains an extensive list of publishers' policies on inclusion of copyrighted material in repositories.

Some universities such as Queensland University of Technology and Harvard University’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences require staff to place their publications in the institutional repository wherever this is possible.

Massey University has its own repository – Massey Research Online - and all theses begun from 2007 will be placed there. Submission of other material is voluntary. Theses, articles, reports, book chapters and other published work placed in a repository will be accessible to more Internet users than it would be if it were solely available through the paid-for journal and there is a strong argument that open access articles are more highly cited than others.

Material in repositories is harvested by a variety of search engines, the most notable being Google Scholar. In New Zealand the Kiwi Research Information Service (KRIS) indexes all the materials in New Zealand repositories. Because the repositories contain full documents your search will actually search all the words, even in a thesis.

5 g - Exercise

Search KRIS for material on a topic of interest. If that fails try searching for wetlands.

Next Module – Google Scholar

6 - Google Scholar

From the time it became the predominant search engine around the year 2000 a common criticism of Google was that much of the information it found was popular-level and amateurish and frequently had an advocacy or commercial agenda. The introduction of Google Scholar in 2004 was an attempt to counter this criticism and, although it remains controversial, GS quickly found a market among students and researchers who found it easier to use and often more productive than conventional databases.

Rather than web pages GS generally returns peer-reviewed scholarly articles and books at the top of its list of search results.

6 a - Spidering

GS is created by the same spidering process as standard Google and this gives it some significant advantages

• because spidering is relatively cheap compared to the production costs of conventional databases Google Scholar is able to index massive amounts of material
• because it indexes all words from the full text of documents GS is able to search at a depth and specificity that conventional databases are unable to achieve
• it is able to link documents through citation data and produce highly effective relevance ranking.

There are some disadvantages as well

• academic documents are rather more complex in structure than web pages and the spider often gets things wrong, reading words from the title as if they were author names and so on
• coverage is always uncertain and GS is not generally as up-to-date as conventional databases.

6 b - Authentication

Because publishers have recognised that there is an advantage in having their copyrighted content indexed by Google Scholar most of them allow the spider to crawl across and index full journal articles and even books. Much of what is found may be material that is not openly accessible to all Internet users.

If you are on a Massey campus your IP address will ensure that your subscription entitlements are recognised when you link to an article from Google Scholar; if you are off-campus you can ensure that you receive the same entitlements by accessing Google Scholar through the Library's Article Database page. You will be required to sign in and then your Internet session will be recognised as a Massey one.

If you are off-campus NEVER go directly to http://www.google.com!

6 c - Searching Google Scholar

The same basic search techniques are used in Google Scholar as in the parent product. Words are automatically ANDed, OR can be used in upper case and phrases should be placed in quotes.

Exercise

Repeat your topic from Module 1 in Google Scholar - http://scholar.google.com/

• The effects of lunar phases on our behaviour
• Does self esteem affect academic performance?
• Do fish recognise their kin?
• Oral communication in the workplace
• Are our memories of childhood accurate?
• Efficacy studies of folk remedies
• Implications of Coastal sand mining in New Zealand
• The integration of teenage children of immigrant families into New Zealand society
• Illness in Wuthering Heights

6 d - Finding recent articles

Because Google Scholar pushes highly cited articles to the top of its relevance ranking often those at the top of the list are quite old

Click to run search

Clicking on recent articles brings more recent ones to the top but you should be aware that it is not possible to sort GS records strictly by date

6 e - Advanced search

Clicking on Advanced Scholar Search gives us some more options

For high relevance we can ask for our search terms to occur in the title

We can specify a particular author

We can specify a range of years or a specific year

Or we can specify a specific publication

Or articles from a specific subject area

6 f - Author searching

Google Scholar has a smart author search algorithm that allows initials to go either before or after the family name. Both of the following produce the same result

Because of the breadth of its coverage GS can be especially useful in tracking down incomplete, obscure or “hard-to-find” references.

6 g - Exercise

Use Google Scholar to find the article written by DAD Parry and published in Nature in 1968.

6 h - Google Scholar and documents

Records in GS generally link directly to full documents on publishers' websites or in collections like JSTOR. As we have seen however there are often multiple paths to an article. This is why searches often return multiple versions of the same record

If we click directly on the blue title link the article will open because Massey subscribes to this journal. However if we decide to look at the eight different versions we get some more choices

Again the first one on the list is the publisher's version. The second one, however, takes us to an author's version of the article in the Queensland University of Technology's digital repository. Some others on the list are bibliographic records only. Its coverage of repositories and other non-publisher sources makes GS a valuable tool for finding articles where Massey does not have a subscription.

6 i - Google Scholar and MasseyLink

MasseyLink is a utility that allows us to find and link to all Massey-subscribed content. As we have seen Google Scholar does a pretty good job of linking to articles on publishers' websites and in repositories, but occasionally MasseyLink will provide material that would not otherwise be accessible, for example when an article is available in print through the Library catalogue.

If there is no relevant access for an article MasseyLink will not display, so if it's there it's worth checking out! Sometimes a publisher's website will offer the article for sale and in these circumstances you should always take the MasseyLink option to check the catalogue for print copies or to place an interlibrary loan request. Because of the poor quality of many Google Scholar references there will be more problems using it than is usual with standard databases.

6 j - Google Scholar preferences

As long as you are on the Massey network MasseyLink will display whenever appropriate; off-campus, however, you need to set it as a preference for your browser. Open Scholar Preferences at the top right of the screen, enter massey in the Library Links box and click on Find Library.

Choose Massey University Library and save your preferences. MasseyLink will display on your search results from now on whenever it has appropriate content or suggestions.

GS can also export references directly to EndNote if its preferences have been set

Next Module - Reflections on Google Scholar

7 - Reflections on Google Scholar

Its relatively straightforward and familiar search interface, the breadth of its coverage and its sometimes startling ability to bring highly relevant results to the top have made GS the first port of call among an increasing number of academics and students. By searching the full text of the articles, rather than simply titles, abstracts and keywords, GS is often able to find very precise information more effectively than conventional databases.

Google scholar is not without its detractors, the most notable of whom is Peter Jacso of the University of Hawaii who deplores its looseness and inaccuracy compared to conventional databases -

Google Scholar (Redux) Péter's Digital Reference Shelf June 2005

Occasionally the GS spider gets things hilariously wrong. You can search it for influenza and vaccine as authors and get the following result -

In this case the article is an editorial without an author so GS has interpreted the paragraph headings as author names -

There are three possible approaches to Google Scholar all of which have serious advocates

• avoid using it and confine your searching to reputable, professionally-produced databases
• use only GS as other databases are too difficult and it produces a superior result
• use GS as an essential scholarly resource because of the depth of its full-text indexing but be aware of its limitations and always search other sources as well.

Not surprisingly I favour the third approach. Here is my own comparative study of Google Scholar and other information sources

Examining the claims of Google Scholar as a serious information source

Next Module – Google Book Search

8 - Google Book Search

8 a - Basic searching

The shift from searching brief records to whole documents that we have seen with Google Scholar is even more dramatically evident in Google Book Search. Here the text of the whole book can be searched through for combinations words or phrases.

Click on the image to search

Google Book Search returns a hit only if our words appear on the same page and when we click on the blue link we are taken to the first page on which the terms are present.

8 b - Searching within the book

Note that it is now possible for us to search for other words or phrases within the book. Here we have looked for all occurrences of the word histocompatibility

8 c - Views

Google Book Search has four different levels of access or "views"

• No preview indicates that our search words are present
• Snippet view tells us that our words are present but does not take us to the relevant page or allow us to further search the book
• Limited preview takes us to the appropriate page and allows us to search within the book but does not give us access to the whole book or allow us to copy it in any way
• Full view allows us to search and navigate the whole book and may allow us to download it

8d – Finding references within books

A common complaint by researchers in the humanities and social sciences (and other book-oriented disciplines) is that their work is frequently cited in books, but that this activity is invisible to the standard bibliometric tools like Web of Science and Scopus.

Here, for example, we found 40 references in books to Atholl Anderson’s The Welcome of Strangers.

Click to run search

8 d - Exercise

Find information on a topic of your choice in Google Book Search. Try limiting to Full view items.

Note that the Massey Library catalogue includes links to GBS

8 e - Other book collections

New Zealand Electronic Text Collection

The Internet Archive Open-Access Text Archive

Massey Library's List of Ebooks Collections includes some free collections as well.

Next Module - Wikipedia

9 - Wikipedia and other novel information sources

9 a - What is Wikipedia?

Wikipedia calls itself "the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit". Launched in 2001 with the apparently idealistic goal of harnessing the "wisdom of the crowd" and of using consensus as the best means of arriving at the truth the English version of Wikipedia now has nearly 2.5 million articles and has become perhaps the most heavily used information source on the Internet.

The idea of an online encyclopedia created and continually updated by its user community is the very essence of Web 2.0 and is rightly treated with great suspicion by many librarians and scholars. It violates one of the fundamental principles of information quality assessment, that of clearly stated and transparent intellectual responsibility. So important is this principle that we refer to academic works by the names of their authors - e.g. Dawkins, 1995.

A second important principle that Wikipedia violates is that of immutability - when we cite an article, book or report we should know exactly what it is that we are referring to. With print this was not a problem and even with the advent of the electronic journal the "copy of record" is still an important principle.

9 b - A closer look

Let's have a look at the Wikipedia entry on the Treaty of Waitangi. What we find here is a well-balanced and informative account of a complex and controversial issue, considerably longer and more detailed than that found in Encyclopedia Britannica. Many of the statements are referenced and several of the major works on the topic are cited. There is a good list of further readings and links to other web material on the topic. It would probably be difficult to find a better place to send someone wanting to know about the treaty.

To see how Wikipedia works click on the history tab at the top of the page. You will see that this page is regularly edited and updated by a number of contributors, some of whom have nicknames and some of whom are simply ip numbers. You can see what each change was by clicking on last and to see the difference between an older version and the present one click on cur.

9 c- Quality

Wikipedia tends to work best when there is a strong community of users monitoring changes for an entry and ensuring that it is not hijacked by extremists or vandalised. If you click on the discussion tab you can see the conversation or debate as it takes place. It is also really good for "technical" and scientific subjects like the carbon cycle, accounts of historical events like the Field of the Cloth of Gold, biographies of prominent figures like Edward Gibbon Wakefield and many other topics.

However the quality of Wikipedia content is very uneven and much of it is poorly researched, badly written or just lame. The entry on Te Rauparaha is very light on detail and a look at the discussion tab indicates that Wikipedia itself doesn't rate it highly.

The history indicates that there has not been a lot of editing activity on this article.

Some of what is on Wikipedia is just plain bad. A good way to check out an encyclopedia is to look up a subject about which you know something. I have an interest in the transition from alchemy to chemistry but when I look at the Wikipedia entry on Alchemy it presents a view of the subject that is at least fifty years out of date. None of the recent literature on the subject is listed and the list of references includes a number of introductory texts on chemistry and physics. The research could have been done in any small college or public library.

9 d - Exercise

Look up Wikipedia on a subject about which you know something. Check its list of references, the history and discussion.

9 e - Alternatives to Wikipedia

There is no one big competitor to Wikipedia but there are many excellent subject-based sources suitable for undergraduate students.

Te Ara Encyclopedia of New Zealand

Dictionary of New Zealand Biography

The Encyclopedia of Life

Massey Library Reference Resources

9f - This is a man's world

“86.73 per cent of contributors to the reference work – the people who actually write the stuff – are male and only 12.64 per cent are female”

Michael Bywater, The Independent 7 February 2011

Next Module – RSS Feeds

9g – Wikipedia on Wikipedia

For some sensible advice see the Wikipedia entry on Researching with Wikipedia!

10 - RSS feeds

10 a - What are they?

RSS feeds are a great way to get web content to come to you rather than you having to go out and look at it. They work best for anything that is regularly updated such as a newspaper; rather than having to go out and look separately at the websites of your favourites newspapers you can simply read their headlines on your feed reader and link to the full stories of those you wish to read. Here is a selection of feeds from local newspapers from my RSS reader

In an academic context RSS feeds are useful for

• newspapers and magazines
• journal contents pages
• database search alerts
• new titles in the library
• blogs
• university news

10 b - Finding a feed

You can tell if a web page contains a feed by the presence of this symbol in your browser (at the top!)

In either Internet Explorer or Firefox the presence of an orange icon ( rather than grey) indicates that you can subscribe to a feed of new items from this page. In this case if we click on the icon we can access the Opinion & Ideas feed from the Chronicle of Higher Education.

Click to run

You are offered various options for subscribing

There are many different readers but a simple rule of thumb is that the url (web address) of this page is the address of the feed and this can be used to add it to any reader.

10 c - Readers

At the most basic level you can subscribe to a feed through your browser using either Favorites (Internet Explorer) or Live Bookmarks (Firefox). This is what our feed looks like in IE.

Sooner or later you may want to use a rather more sophisticated means of managing your feeds. Google Reader is a good example of a web-based feed reader. You can find Google Reader from the Google home page by clicking on more

You can sign in or create an account using your Massey email and a password

10 d - Adding a feed to your reader

You are now ready to add a subscription. If you are using Google Reader you can simply click on the Orange Icon and then choose the Subscribe to this feed using Google option.

When you click on Subscribe Now you will be able to add the feed to Google Reader or iGoogle which we will look at shortly.

However you don’t have to use Google. Using another reader you can simply highlight and copy (control-C) the address of the Subscribe to this feed page.

Now take the feed address you copied, paste it into your reader and click Add subscription

10 e - Viewing your feeds

The latest feeds are now available for viewing, either in list view

or expanded view

while clicking on the blue title link takes you to the full story on the original website

10 f - Exercise

Go to Google Reader and either sign in or create an account. Now open Wired Campus and click on the orange RSS feed icon. Click on the address bar and press Control-C to copy the url . Now go back to Google Reader, click on Add subscription and paste the feed into your reader.

10 g - Journal contents pages

Most electronic journals will offer an RSS feed of their tables of contents. Here is a list of journals from Elsevier's ScienceDirect

Clicking on the RSS icon will take us to the feed

Right click on the link to copy the shortcut for the feed

Pasting it into to your reader will create a subscription to the latest content from this journal

Often simply googling the title of a journal will take you to its official home page where you can "find a feed"

Note that on this page there is a link to the feed or we could simply have taken it from the address bar

As new issues are published this feed will be updated

10 h - RSS feeds from databases

On the Web of Science database open the Search History and click on Save History/Create Alert. NB - you need to be registered and signed in to do this.

Give your search a name and click on Save - you don't need to select email alerts unless you want them as well.

Now click the orange XML button

Subscribe to this in the normal way

New articles on this topic will display in your reader as they are added to the database

10 i - Feed aggregators

While Google Reader is a simple way of accessing your feeds you may wish to use a more sophisticated reader that brings together large numbers of feeds into a personal home page with multiple tabs. iGoogle is a good one - http://www.google.com/ig

Netvibes is another - http://www.netvibes.com/

10 j – Twitter

The popular micro-blogging service Twitter can be used as a “current awareness” toll and can put you in touch with trends as they emerge. Many of the same services that have rss feeds will also have Twitter feeds. Individual messages, known as tweets, are restricted to 140 characters and usually include a link of some sort.

From a practical point of view there are a couple of disadvantages to the use of Twitter as a research discovery tool

• A very limited amount of information can be conveyed in each tweet
• Because tweets are streamed they can be difficult to keep up with
• Tweeting is so easy that many people overdo it. You will possibly be more interested in a scholar’s ideas than in the weather in their hometown or their kids’ birthdays.

On the other hand Twitter is proving to be a highly effective means of social networking and is used to form and maintain ad hoc communities. It is often used at academic conferences as a means of communicating and networking.

Next Module – Social Networking