I get to go to DTIC, yay! I'm so excited - I love DTIC - the folks who work there do a great job and provide a valuable service. They have an annual conference, but usually other people from MPOW go as their only conference and I don't go because I go to SLA and ASIST. I hang out with a bunch of military librarians at SLA, and I know they're disappointed that I don't attend the DTIC conference, so this will be a chance to catch up with them, too, and learn more about what's going on right now.

Susan Fingerman and I are going to be presenting Wednesday morning, from 9am-10am in one of the breakout sessions. Here's our blurb:
Online communities, specifically, Communities of Practice, are a key tool in support of information sharing. But they are not “fire and forget.” For a community to be successful and provide sufficient return on investment, it has to be carefully and thoughtfully designed and maintained. Further, when designing communities intended for scientists and engineers, it is important to take into account the research on information and communication behaviors of these groups. In this session Christina K. Pikas will discuss the information behavior of scientists and engineers, good practices for online community design. Susan Fingerman will discuss practical concepts relating to the design of Communities of Practice within an organization, and provide some real-life examples from her work at The Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory.

If you want to go, looks like you can still register. The plenary sessions on Monday and Tuesday look awesome, but I have to catch up on work so I'll only be there Wednesday.  ¶ 9:12 AM| (2) comments |cites (technorati) |

  To what extent do scientists use social software? (first - apology for being so quiet on here - I'm ok, but have sort of a writers' block for the 2 presentations I have to do in the next couple of weeks, the paper that I'm trying to get journal-ready, the two literature reviews for quantitative projects, and the conference paper that's due on the 15th... well and the standard homework and teaching myself R)
( let's actually talk about STEM, but not really clinical medicine, well, unless you want to)

The point of this post is to say what I know about the title, and to ask for pointers for additional information. Ideally, I'd like percentages or some such for various flavors of STEM researchers using each type of social software.

Here's what I have.
From: Mark Ware Consulting. (2008). Peer review in scholarly journals: Perspective of the scholarly community – an international study. Bristol, UK: Author. Retrieved January 28, 2008 from http://www.publishingresearch.net/documents/PeerReviewFullPRCReport-final.pdf

From 2006 APS Industrial Membership Survey Final Report September 12, 2006. http://www.aps.org/about/governance/committees/commemb/upload/2006_Industrial_Member_Survey.pdf
5% of Industrial Physicists surveyed read or maintain blogs for social networking

From both Bonetta, L. (2007). Scientists enter the blogosphere. Cell, 129(3), 443-445. DOI:10.1016/j.cell.2007.04.032 and Hannay, T. (2007). Web 2.0 in science. CTWatch Quarterly, 3(3) . Retrieved March 8,2008 from http://www.ctwatch.org/quarterly/articles/2007/08/web-20-in-science/
Estimates that there are between 1,000 and 2,000 science blogs

Otherwise just sort of case studies of individual physicists, biologists, chemists developing and using wiki software (or even in some cases semantic wiki software). (Into this category go Distler, Bradley, Murray-Rust, etc.)

Personally, I think the APS number is pretty encouraging because I would think industrial physicists would be much less likely to adopt these things than academics and also because they might read blogs and not know they're reading a blog.

Help? Any other stats?

Any better numbers on scientists contributing to or maintaining wikis? Using social bookmarking? Blogs come and go, any idea whether there's a net plus for science?

Thanks in advance for any help!
  ¶ 11:55 AM| (0) comments |cites (technorati) |