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Literaturverz. S. 242 - 279

Information we receive from and create together with our social networks is becoming increasingly important. Social information has a great impact on our information behaviour and there are many possible angles and layers in studying social aspects in information science. This book presents some of these angles. Social Information Research, co-edited by Gunilla Widen and Kim Holmberg communicates current research looking into different aspects of social information as part of information behaviour research. There is a special emphasis on the new innovations supporting contemporary information behavior and the social media context within which it can sit. As a concept, social information has been studied in biology, psychology and sociology among other disciplines. This book is relevant for various actors in the library and information science field and will be useful for researchers, educators, and practitioners while coordinating empirical research on social information and providing an overview of some of the present research about social information.

Information we receive from and create together with our social networks is becoming increasingly important. Social information has a great impact on our information behaviour and there are many possible angles and layers in studying social aspects in information science. This book presents some of these angles. Social Information Research, co-edited by Gunilla Widen and Kim Holmberg communicates current research looking into different aspects of social information as part of information behaviour research. There is a special emphasis on the new innovations supporting contemporary information behavior and the social media context within which it can sit. As a concept, social information has been studied in biology, psychology and sociology among other disciplines. This book is relevant for various actors in the library and information science field and will be useful for researchers, educators, and practitioners while coordinating empirical research on social information and providing an overview of some of the present research about social information.

The goals of this research were two-fold. First, this research set out to investigate possible institutional characteristics that may or may not have an influence on online attention or, in other words, the number of altmetric events surrounding the scientific articles from that institution. The results suggest that international connections are important in the accumulation of altmetric events, possibly due to the creation of weak ties between researchers and their institutions. Second, it was studied whether the institutional research profile, i.e. in what fields the institution published, matched with the distribution of altmetric events across the same fields of science. Our analysis shows that the universities' research profiles are not always reflected in the online events. Overall, the results of both goals of this research reflect a complex system where the received online attention can be attributed to many different factors.

In September 2013 the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change published its Working Group 1 report, the first comprehensive assessment of physical climate science in six years, constituting a critical event in the societal debate about climate change. This paper analyses the nature of this debate in one public forum: Twitter. Using statistical methods, tweets were analyzed to discover the hashtags used when people tweeted about the IPCC report, and how Twitter users formed communities around their conversational connections. In short, the paper presents the topics and tweeters at this particular moment in the climate debate. The most used hashtags related to themes of science, geographical location and social issues connected to climate change. Particularly noteworthy were tweets connected to Australian politics, US politics, geoengineering and fracking. Three communities of Twitter users were identified. Researcher coding of Twitter users showed how these varied according to geographical location and whether users were supportive, unsupportive or neutral in their tweets about the IPCC. Overall, users were most likely to converse with users holding similar views. However, qualitative analysis suggested the emergence of a community of Twitter users, predominantly based in the UK, where greater interaction between contrasting views took place. This analysis also illustrated the presence of a campaign by the non-governmental organization Avaaz, aimed at increasing media coverage of the IPCC report.

In September 2013 the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change published its first comprehensive assessment of physical climate science in six years, constituting a critical event in the societal debate about climate change. This paper analyses the nature of this debate in one public forum: Twitter. Using webometric methods, tweets were analyzed to discover the hashtags used when people tweeted about the IPCC report, and how Twitter users formed communities around their conversational connections. In short, the paper presents the topics and tweeters at this particular moment in the climate debate.The most used hashtags related to themes of science, geographical location and social issues connected to climate change. Particularly noteworthy were tweets connected to Australian politics, US politics, geoengineering and fracking. Three communities of Twitter users were identified. Researcher coding of Twitter users showed how these varied according to geographical location and whether users were convinced or critical of climate science or policy in their Twitter usage. Overall, users were most likely to converse with users holding similar views. However, two communities displayed significant links between climate convinced and critical users, suggesting that those engaged in the climate debate were exposed to views contrasting with their own.

The expectation that scientific research should provide answers to societal issues and support institutional decision-making is increasing, but still there are no systematic methods of identifying and measuring the wider societal impacts of research. In this article, various views on the meaning of impact, the different types of impact or influence that research can have on the society, and the potential of altmetrics to capture and measure this societal impact will be discussed.