• A layered approach for investigating the topological structure of communities in the Web.

      Thelwall, Mike (MCB UP Ltd, 2003)
      A layered approach for identifying communities in the Web is presented and explored by applying the flake exact community identification algorithm to the UK academic Web. Although community or topic identification is a common task in information retrieval, a new perspective is developed by: the application of alternative document models, shifting the focus from individual pages to aggregated collections based upon Web directories, domains and entire sites; the removal of internal site links; and the adaptation of a new fast algorithm to allow fully-automated community identification using all possible single starting points. The overall topology of the graphs in the three least-aggregated layers was first investigated and found to include a large number of isolated points but, surprisingly, with most of the remainder being in one huge connected component, exact proportions varying by layer. The community identification process then found that the number of communities far exceeded the number of topological components, indicating that community identification is a potentially useful technique, even with random starting points. Both the number and size of communities identified was dependent on the parameter of the algorithm, with very different results being obtained in each case. In conclusion, the UK academic Web is embedded with layers of non-trivial communities and, if it is not unique in this, then there is the promise of improved results for information retrieval algorithms that can exploit this additional structure, and the application of the technique directly to partially automate Web metrics tasks such as that of finding all pages related to a given subject hosted by a single country's universities.
    • An international multidisciplinary analysis of scholarly communication through investigating citation levels

      Thelwall, Mike; Wilkinson, David; Levitt, Jonathan (University of Wolverhampton, 2008)
      This thesis seeks to demonstrate that the new facilities of Web of Science (WoS) online can be used in new ways to enhance understanding of scholarly communication. It investigates four aspects of scholarly communication: characteristics of highly cited articles, citation levels of collaborative articles, citation levels of multi-disciplinary articles, and patterns of annual citation of highly cited articles. For the first two topics it investigates the WoS category of ‘Information Science & Library Science’ (IS&LS), whereas for the other topics it compares diverse WoS categories in science and social science. Although its main data source is WoS, its investigation of disciplinarity also uses Scopus. The thesis finds: (a) Highly cited IS&LS articles tend to be multidisciplinary and cited late, but are not necessarily first-authored by influential IS&LS researchers, (b) Amongst un-cite IS&LS articles the proportion of collaborative articles has remained almost constant over the past three decades whereas for higher cited articles it has grown steadily with time, (C) In social science subjects the level of citation of multi-disciplinary research are generally similar to that of mono-disciplinary research, whereas in science the citations levels for multi-disciplinary research are substantially lower than that of mono-disciplinary research, and (d) In both science and social science many very highly cited articles continue to be heavily cited more than twenty years after publication. This thesis also introduces and uses an indicator for measuring the extent of collaboration called ‘average partner scores’ and indicates a way in which the subject categories of WoS can be investigated without requiring a licence for the WoS database. Finally, it identifies and addresses some of the technical problems of using WoS online to investigate scholarly communication.
    • Collaborative working in health and social care: a review of the literature

      Stepney, Paul M.; Callwood, Ingrid (University of Wolverhampton, 2006)
      The move towards collaborative working in Health and Social Care can be situated within a wider policy shift associated with de-institutionalisation and de-segregation (Payne, 1995). The change from institutional to community-based care (Barr et al, 1999; Sibbald, 2000) meant that the demarcations and hierarchical relations between professions were neither sustainable not appropriate. New ways of working that crossed professional boundaries had to be created, in order to allow a more flexible approach to care delivery (Malin et al, 2002). Collaboration in health and social care is a relatively new field of study, with the first major studies being undertaken in the 1980s (Roy, 2001). The term collaboration has hitherto lacked a clear definition and has been used synonymously with terms such as co-operation, co-ordination, participation and integration. Since the implementation of the 1990 NHS and Community Care Act (Department of Health, 1990), the concept has featured prominently in government policy documents to promote joint working, partnership and the creation of a ‘seamless service’ between health and social care (Maxwell, 1998; Payne, 1995). More recently, the term ‘communities of practice’ (CoPs) has permeated professional agendas (Lave and Wenger, 1991; Anning 2001). At its simplest the concept of collaboration infers that people from different professional and academic backgrounds form a working relationship for the purpose of enhanced service provision. However, the exact nature of the partnership is likely to be contested, whilst fully integrated ‘joined-up’ collaborative practice has so far proved elusive.
    • Evidence for the existence of geographic trends in university web site interlinking

      Thelwall, Mike (MCB UP Ltd, 2002)
      The Web is an important medium for scholarly communication of various types, perhaps eventually to replace entirely some traditional mechanisms such as print journals. Yet the Web analogy of citations, hyperlinks, are much more varied in use and existing citation techniques are difficult to generalise to the new medium. In this context, one new challenging object of study is the modern multi-faceted, multi-genre, partly unregulated university Web site. This paper develops a methodology to analyse the patterns of interlinking between university Web sites and uses it to indicate that the degree of interlinking decreases with distance, at least in the UK. This is perhaps not in itself a surprising result, despite claims of a paradigm shift from the traditional virtual college towards collaboratories, but the methodology developed can also be used to refine existing Web link metrics to produce more powerful tools for comparing groups of sites.
    • Hyperlinks as a data source for science mapping

      Harries, Gareth; Wilkinson, David; Price, Liz; Fairclough, Ruth; Thelwall, Mike (Sage, 2004)
      Hyperlinks between academic web sites, like citations, can potentially be used to map disciplinary structures and identify evidence of connections between disciplines. In this paper we classified a sample of links originating in three different disciplines: maths, physics and sociology. Links within a discipline were found to be different in character to links between pages in different disciplines. There were also disciplinary differences in both types of link. As a consequence, we argue that interpretations of web science maps covering multiple disciplines will need to be sensitive to the contexts of the links mapped.
    • Motivations for academic web site interlinking: evidence for the Web as a novel source of information on informal scholarly communication

      Wilkinson, David; Harries, Gareth; Thelwall, Mike; Price, Liz (Sage, 2003)
      The need to understand authors’ motivations for creating links between university web sites is addressed by a survey of a random collection of 414 such links from the ac.uk domain. A classification scheme was created and applied to this collection. Obtaining inter-classifier agreement as to the single main link creation cause was very difficult because of multiple potential motivations and the fluidity of genre on the Web. Nevertheless, it was clear that, whilst the vast majority, over 90%, was created for broadly scholarly reasons, only two were equivalent to journal citations. It is concluded that academic web link metrics will be dominated by a range of informal types of scholarly communication. Since formal communication can be extensively studied through citation analysis, this provides an exciting new window through which to investigate a facet of a previously obscured type of communication activity.
    • The Forensic Institute Research Network.

      Sutton, Raul; Jamieson, Allan J. (York: Physical Sciences Centre, The Higher Education Academy, 2008)
      The burgeoning activity in forensic science in universities continues to attract criticism. A positive aspect is the potential to inject a much-needed boost to research in all forensic practices. Only recently has fingerprinting, for example, been exposed to rigorous scientific examination and, to a great extent, been found wanting as regards its science – probability apparently has no place in fingermark examination. In response to the opportunity The Forensic Institute brought together representatives from more than 40 UK universities to discuss how this new resource, academics and students, could be used to further research in the forensic sciences. It was envisaged that many casework-related problems, such as environmental frequencies of trace evidence, could be best accomplished by a lot of small student projects coordinated on a national and perhaps international level by a steering group. This steering group in turn would be part of an integrated research strategy developed in conjunction with practitioners. A virtuous cycle of practice, research, development, and practice would be the outcome. And so, in 2004, The Forensic Institute Research Network (FIRN) was born.