Young researchers are increasingly using free web technology to help with their research – but they are not active in creating content, says a major British Library/ JISC generation Y, ‘Researchers of Tomorrow’ report.
The UK’s largest survey of the information seeking behaviours of doctoral students born between 1982-1994, commonly dubbed generation Y, shows a ‘modest increase’ in the students’ use of web technology in the last year.
Compared with a sample of older students, more of the generation Y sample had used at least one kind of open web or Web 2.0 technology with only 8% saying they had used none at all.
The report shows that passive use of these open web technologies is more common than active use. Researchers are reading wikis and blogs without adding to them; they make passive use of internet forums for research, and few blog themselves. For example, while 29% made passive use of internet discussion forums, only 13% were active on them.
The generation Y students also look to their peers for advice and inspiration on technology more than key influencers like their supervisors and library and information services staff.
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The growing flood of scholarly literature is exposing the weaknesses of current, citation–based methods of evaluating and filtering articles. A novel and promising approach is to examine the use and citation of articles in a new forum: Web 2.0 services like social bookmarking and microblogging. Metrics based on this data could build a “Scientometics 2.0,” supporting richer and more timely pictures of articles’ impact. This paper develops the most comprehensive list of these services to date, assessing the potential value and availability of data from each. We also suggest the next steps toward building and validating metrics drawn from the social Web.