Wei Jeng

Eating disorder questions in Yahoo! Answers: Information, conversation, or reflection?

This study investigated a particular form of social Q&A – Yahoo! Answers – and the nature of the questions posed by teens on the topic of eating disorders. The goals of this study were to identify the information needs of questioners in Yahoo! Answers vis a vis the topic of eating disorders, to create a taxonomy of question types in Yahoo! Answers on the topic of eating disorders, and finally, to contribute to broader models of question-asking in social Q&A. We achieved these goals through a content analysis of 2230 questions posed in Yahoo! Answers between December 2005 and April 2011. This resulted in a classification scheme with five overarching themes - Seeking Information, Seeking Emotional Support, Seeking Communication, Seeking Self-Expression, and Seeking Help to Complete a Task, and the sub-categories of factual, diagnosis, treatment or intervention, validation, seeking comfort, conversation starters, deep talk, confession, reflection, homework help, and manuscript ideas. Through the investigation of the socio-emotional aspects of social Q&A, this study enriches our understanding of the affective dimension of health information behavior.

Groups in Academic Social Networking Services--An Exploration of Their Potential as a Platform for Multi-disciplinary Collaboration

The importance of collaborations across geographical, institutional and/or disciplinary boundaries has been widely recognized in research communities, yet there exist a range of obstacles to such collaborations. This study is concerned with understanding the potential of academic social networking services (ASNS) as a medium or platform for cross-disciplinary or multi-disciplinary collaborations. Many ASNS sites allow scholars to form online groups as well as to build up their professional network individually. In this study, we look at the patterns of user participation in online groups in a ASNS site, Mendeley, with an emphasis on assessing the degree to which people from different disciplinary backgrounds gather in these groups. The results show that while there exists a need for better means to facilitate group formation and growth, the groups in Mendeley exhibit a great deal of diversity in their member composition in terms of disciplines. Overall, the findings of this study support the argument that online social networking, especially ASNS, may foster multi-disciplinary collaborations by providing a platform for researchers from diverse backgrounds to find one another and cooperate on issues of common interests.

Changing communication on researchgate through interface updates

Informal scholarly communication across the Web is a growing component of the scholarly communication infrastructure. This study describes the effects of three different interfaces on these informal channels. Interface design has a widely studied effect on user behavior, and new users often encounter barriers during accessing social media tools. Using a mixed methods approach, we collected and grouped 413 posts across three distinct interfaces of ResearchGates communication platform. Our results show that scholars were more polite in the initial group discussion interface but that user interface design did not change the core communication patterns of sharing information and opinions among scholars. The site also transitioned from one-to-many discussions to one-to-one posts, but new users were generally welcomed to the scholarly communications.

Linking information and people in a social system for academic conferences

ABSTRACT This paper investigates the feasibility of maintaining a social information system to support attendees at an academic conference. The main challenge of this work was to create an infrastructure where users’ social activities, such as bookmarking, tagging, and social linking could be used to enhance user navigation and maximize the users’ ability to locate two important types of information in conference settings: presentations to attend and attendees to meet. We developed Conference Navigator 3, a social conference support system that integrates a conference schedule planner with a social linking service. We examined its potential and functions in the context of a medium-scale academic conference. In this paper, we present the design of the system’s socially enabled features and report the results of a conference-based study. Our study demonstrates the feasibility of social information systems for supporting academic conferences. Despite the low number of potential users and the short timeframe in which conferences took place, the usage of the system was high enough to provide sufficient data for social mechanisms. The study shows that most critical social features were highly appreciated and used, and provides direction for further research.

Mendeley group as a new source of interdisciplinarity study: how do disciplines interact on mendeley?

In this paper, we studied interdisciplinary structures by looking into how online academic groups of different disciplines share members and followers. Results based on Mendeley online groups show clear interdisciplinary structures, indicating Mendeley online groups as a promising data source and a new perspective of disciplinarity and interdisciplinarity studies.

I know what you are going through: answers to informational questions about eating disorders in Yahoo! Answers: a qualitative study

The purpose of this study is to enrich our understanding of social question and answer (Q&A) sites as a health information source for teens. To do so we investigated answers to 81 informational questions about eating disorders posted in Yahoo! Answers, a social Q&A site. Through a content analysis, we found that users do not always respond to eating disorder questions with credible, factual information, even if the need for it was expressed in the question. The findings suggest that people who pose questions in Yahoo! Answers use it as a social and emotional scaffold rather than an informational source, even if their questions are couched in terms that suggest they are seeking information. Further, a large portion of the people who answer such questions understand this to be the purpose and rarely provide answers drawn from evidence-based medicine or reliable, credible sources for health information. Through the investigation of the answers to questions on a health topic that is prevalent amongst teens, this study deepens our understanding of the health information behavior of young people and the quality of the health information they find in Yahoo! Answers.

Linguistic characteristics of eating disorder questions on Yahoo! Answers - content, style, and emotion

Social Q&A provides the possibility of looking into how people verbally express their information needs in natural language. In this study, we analyzed linguistic properties of different types of questions on the topic of eating disorders in Yahoo! Answers. Using term frequency analysis, Part-of-Speech (POS) analysis, and sentiment analysis, we examined linguistic content, linguistic style, and emotional expressions in two broad categories of eating disorder questions from Yahoo! Answers -- socio-emotional questions and informational questions. Overall, the results of this study show that the language used in these two categories of questions are substantially different, suggesting the different nature of the needs that underlie these questions. Socio-emotional questions take similar characteristics to personal narratives, focusing on past experiences and emotions. The heavy use of negative emotion words in this question type, along with other distinct linguistic characteristics, suggests that a key motivation of users asking this type of question is to work through their emotions related to the given health issue (eating disorders). On the other hand, informational questions show traits of relatively complex, precise, and objective writing, and reflect much varied interests with regard to the topic of eating disorders. All in all, this study demonstrates that the combination of simple text analytic techniques reveals much about the linguistic characteristics associated with different kinds of questions, and thereby shed lights on the nature of the needs underneath the questions.

Using participatory design and visual narrative inquiry to investigate researchers’ data challenges and recommendations for library research data services

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to report on an information gathering study on users’ research data-related challenges and proposals for library research data services (RDS). This study probes how early career researchers visually conceptualize the research process in their disciplines, their self-reported research data challenges, and their recommendations for library RDS. Design/methodology/approach – Two focus group sessions were undertaken with a total of eight early career researchers. Adopting the visual narrative inquiry method, the participants were asked to sketch the general research process in their domain. The individuals’ illustrations of the research process were then used as the basis for reflecting on their data-related needs and potential RDS that would assist them during the research process. Findings – Participants presented a research process that was more personal and, in most cases, more imperfect than the research lifecycle models that academic libraries are increasingly usin...

DataCite as a novel bibliometric source : coverage, strengths and limitations

This paper explores the characteristics of DataCite to determine its possibilities and potential as a new bibliometric data source to analyze the scholarly production of open data. Open science and the increasing data sharing requirements from governments, funding bodies, institutions and scientific journals has led to a pressing demand for the development of data metrics. As a very first step towards reliable data metrics, we need to better comprehend the limitations and caveats of the information provided by sources of open data. In this paper, we critically examine records downloaded from the DataCite’s OAI API and elaborate a series of recommendations regarding the use of this source for bibliometric analyses of open data. We highlight issues related to metadata incompleteness, lack of standardization, and ambiguous definitions of several fields. Despite these limitations, we emphasize DataCite’s value and potential to become one of the main sources for data metrics development.

Incorporating data sharing to the reward system of science: Linking DataCite records to authors in the Web of Science

Purpose It is widely recognized that sharing data is beneficial not only for science but also for the common good, and researchers are increasingly expected to share their data. However, many researchers are still not making their data available, one of the reasons being that this activity is not adequately recognized in the current reward system of science. Since the attribution of data sets to individual researchers is necessary if we are to include them in research evaluation processes, the purpose of this paper is to explore the feasibility of linking data set records from DataCite to the authors of articles indexed in the Web of Science. Design/methodology/approach DataCite and WoS records are linked together based on the similarity between the names of the data sets’ creators and the articles’ authors, as well as the similarity between the noun phrases in the titles of the data sets and the titles and abstract of the articles. Findings The authors report that a large number of DataCite records can be attributed to specific authors in WoS, and the authors demonstrate that the prevalence of data sharing varies greatly depending on the research discipline. Originality/value It is yet unclear how data sharing can provide adequate recognition for individual researchers. Bibliometric indicators are commonly used for research evaluation, but to date no large-scale assessment of individual researchers’ data sharing activities has been carried out.