Promotion of Scientific Work: Thesis Proposal

Promotion of scientific work via social media platforms and the development of supporting research indicators. (Tentative Title)

We are looking for students that want to explore a research theme in the area of scientometrics, which is the study of measuring and analyzing science, technology and innovation. In particular, we are looking for ‘self-starter’ students that are capable to challenge the status quo and providing innovative and out of the box ideas for this research theme. He/she will explore this research theme and will bring an information management perspective to this area.

In short, he will study how social media (Facebook, Twitter, etc.) can influence the promotion, marketing, and dissemination of scholarly articles and the development of research indicators based on social media activity (see the references for background information).
This project does not involve an internship. Instead, it will try to have a high academic relevance and theoretical contribution and, based on the quality of your work the candidate may be able to publish the results in the proceedings and scientific journals.
We currently envisage two theses to be written related to the research theme, one that will analyze the theoretical aspect of the domain and one more tool oriented that is ideal for candidates that prefer a more hands on approach:

1. A overview and review of the current literature on the promotion of scientific work on the author level, journal level, and other dimensions. The literature might be captured in the form of a bibliometric network in VOSviewer (see vosviewer.com). VOSviewer is a software tool for constructing and visualizing bibliometric networks. In addition, want to understand the variables and weight of the variables that make up the marketing of scientific papers. For this thesis programming skills are not essential.
2. Design-oriented thesis that will lead to the design of a prototype for measuring the social impact of the scientific work. The candidate will have the opportunity to learn how modern eCommerce and eMarketing solutions works in real life and will design a framework for quantify how socially driven scientometric indicators influence the impact of the research in society and in research communities.

A few references related to the promotion of scientific work:

• Sugimoto, C. R., Work, S., Larivière, V. and Haustein, S. (2017), Scholarly use of social media and altmetrics: A review of the literature. Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology, 68: 2037-2062. doi:10.1002/asi.23833.
• Wang Xianwen, Yunxue Cui, Qingchun Li, and Xinhui Guo. (2017), Social Media Attention Increases Article Visits: An Investigation on Article-Level Referral Data of PeerJ, Frontiers in Research Metrics and Analytics
  2 (December 20, 2017). doi:10.3389/frma.2017.00011.
• Hadas Shema, Judit Bar‐Ilan and Mike Thelwall. (2015), Do blog citations correlate with a higher number of future citations? Research blogs as a potential source for alternative metrics. https://doi.org/10.1002/asi.23037

If you are interested in the topic, do not hesitate to contact us for more information. Our contact details are: Emiel Caron & Francesco Lelli.