Social Media Metrics and Scholarly Publishing 2.0: A couple more articles
Posted on | August 21, 2009 | No Comments
I have been lucky enough to be snowed under with work over the last couple of weeks, with a lot of my time being spent working on a couple of articles I have been asked to write: one on social media metrics; and one on scholarly publishing 2.0. As I’ve mentioned before, I love writing articles because it’s a great way to supplement one’s income and advertise one’s abilities. It also forces you to construct your thoughts in a coherent manner. Whereas a blog post is generally off-the-cuff, and presentations can rely too heavily on mere rhetoric, knowledge of an editor’s critical eye forces journal articles to be built on stronger arguments.
The two pieces provided me with two different problems. The problem with writing a piece on social media metrics is that you obviously don’t have carte blanche to ramble on for as many pages as you like, whereas when writing about scholarly publishing 2.0 it is all too easy to start slipping into ‘ranting blogger’ mode, rather than ‘objective professional’ mode.
Social Media Metrics are increasingly recognised as important, and will be the focus of an increasing number of books over the years to come. However with so many different technologies, being used for so many different purposes, it is quite hard to provide an informative article in just 2,500 words. It’s about finding a compromise between a piece that focuses too much on abstract concepts such as ‘influence’ and one that just provides concrete descriptions of some of the specific metrics that are possible.
When writing about Open Science and Scholarly Publishing 2.0 I find near impossible to not get excited about the opportunities that the new generation of web technologies offer to the advancement of science, but also despair at the lack of progress in terms of academics embracing these technologies. Something I have been equally culpable of as an academic. The positive feedback from the editor would seem to indicate that I managed to steer just far away enough from ranting blogger to make it into print.
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