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Electronic copy available at: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1328341

ESRC End of Award Report

The World Wide Web of Science: Emerging Global Sources of

Expertise

RES-160-25-0031

Ralph Schroeder, Alexandre Caldas, Shefali Virkar,

and William H. Dutton

Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford

Background

The World Wide Web of Science (WWWoS) project explored the degree to

which the Internet is supporting a ‘winner-take-all’ pattern of access to scientific

expertise. Rather than enabling expertise to be accessed from a more

diversified array of sources, a winner-take-all, or power law, hypothesis posits

that online access will reinforce central sources of science expertise, leading

access to expertise to become more concentrated.

This role of the Internet in ‘reconfiguring access’ to information (Dutton 2004),

including scientific expertise, is becoming increasingly important as people shift

more time and attention to the use of online resources (mainly the Web) to

access information and expertise in an expanding array of information sectors.

While there has been little research in this area, the topic of search engines,

online resources, and access to expertise has become a prominent research

issue during the course of the present project.

Objectives

The aim of this research project was to assess whether and to what extent the

Internet and the Web could be transforming access to sources of scientific

expertise. There are competing theoretical perspectives, either for a

concentration effect for the most heavily linked and accessed sites (driven by

‘power laws’ or a winner-takes-all effect) or for a greater diversification or

‘democratization’ of online resources.

This led to a number of related

questions, such as whether the Internet is associated with the use of more

global versus local sources of expertise? Are there differences across

disciplines? How central a role is the Internet playing in shaping access to

information and expertise among scientists?

In addition to these substantive questions, the project also sought to contribute

to the development and application of Webmetric techniques, and their

combination with in-depth interviews and focus groups. The project team found

that this triangulation yielded greater insight into the role of the Internet in

accessing different sources of expertise.

This literature is reviewed in the project proposal, but the classic work remains Merton (1988). An

important popularization of the ‘winner-take-all’ thesis is provided by Frank and Cook (1995), and

moves into the context of the Internet with Barabási (2003).

Electronic copy available at: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1328341

Methods

This was a one-year exploratory research project. It employed multiple traits

and methods to empirically examine patterns of access to scientific expertise.

We approached this by describing networks of scientific communication. Since

critical collaboration tends to be focused on particular areas of science, we

studied communication patterns surrounding specific issues. This was

accomplished by sampling key global issues that reflected a range of

challenges of world-wide importance. Topics were chosen also to avoid

favouring a winner-take-all hypothesis by selecting issues that were not

inherently more concentrated, such as in a few centres for big science.

Given the exploratory nature of the proposed research, the original proposal

identified six topics from a potentially wide range of issues. These were:

1. Climate Change,

2. Internet and Society,

3. Poverty,

4. Trade Reform,

5. Terrorism and

6. AIDS/HIV

The project was anchored in Webmetric analyses of the structure of networks of

relationships on the Web within each of these six topic areas. This involved

crawling the World Wide Web to identify and collect links which could then be

analyzed to determine the structure of online networks in each issue area.

The Webmetric results were validated and extended through two complimentary

methods. Validation of a sub-sample of issues provided added confidence in the

findings across all six issue areas:

- A set of in-depth interviews were conducted with a sample of known experts --

scientists working within four of the six issue areas. Two were anchored

primarily in the social sciences (Internet and society, terrorism) and two in the

natural sciences (climate change and HIV/AIDS). Four topics from the six were

chosen to allow for greater in-depth analysis of the Web representations and

more interviews with researchers within each topical area. The project team

interviewed 20 researchers, five from within each of the four topics. Given

limited funding for fieldwork, researchers were chosen from universities in

Oxford and Greater London, and do not represent a random sample from a well

defined population of experts. Primarily face-to-face, but also some telephone

interviews, were semi-structured and asked a series of questions to

contextualize and identify how these researchers use the Web and other offline

and online resources. All the interviews were transcribed and coded using

qualitative analysis software (e.g., NviVO) to extract relevant information from

the text of interviews.

- The results of our Webmetric analyses were validated also by two expert

panels, similar to focus groups. One looked at ‘climate change’ and another at

Electronic copy available at: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1328341

‘Internet and society’. Three and five participants respectively were chosen

based on accessibity to the research centre, with each focus group was

conducted in Oxford, at the OII. These enabled us to compare lists of the top

sites with the respondents’ lists of top sites, providing a means for judging the

face validity of the Webmetrics.

Changes in the Research Design

In-depth interviews replaced the originally proposed Web-based survey. The

team’s concern over problems with response rates and limited number of

questions that are practical for a Web-based survey led to abandoning this

method. The interviews provided richer information than was originally

envisaged, supporting a number of publications.

One further change from the original proposal was the decision not to undertake

a study of Usenet groups as an additional source of evidence on academic

networks. Usenet is one of the early systems, created in the 1970s, that

supported distributed discussions over the Internet which has continued to

enable users to post and read articles within a wide range of newsgroups. The

analysis of Usenet groups across these areas was pursued at the first WWWoS

workshop, and the OII was able to obtain permission and a license to analyse

Microsoft’s archive holdings. However, it was not taken beyond this point for two

major reasons. First, a paper had just become available (Matzat 2004) which

covered this topic well. Secondly, it became increasingly clear that the use of

Usenet had become a niche area that was increasingly unrepresentative of

online access by scientists generally. Its use was also being marginalized by

the role of search engines and other online resources, such as digital libraries

and online datasets. It was therefore decided to focus project resources on in-

depth interviews with scientists to validate, interpret and extend the Webmetric

results.

Results

A number of patterns and themes have emerged from this exploratory research,

which are substantively and methodologically useful in shaping follow-on

research. The details are developed further by the two nominated outputs, but

are summarized in this section.

First, the central finding of our study is that the winner-take-all hypothesis fails

to reflect the more complex structures of scientific networks of expertise. It is

true that a small proportion of sites capture a disproportionate share of links, but

the Webmetric analysis and interviews suggest that:

− The structure of networks was more fractal in structure than would be

expected by a simple winner-take-all hypothesis;

− Numerous clusters of institutions and websites are more prominent than

others, but there are many winners sharing the attention of more

specialized networks of researchers and other users;

Key early findings are provided by Fry et. al. (forthcoming), but additional publications are in progress.

− The type of search and the topic make a difference in the overall

structure of expertise, i.e., whether it is a directed search on a topic

where there are established sources, or if the topic requires a more

exploratory approach aimed at tapping a range of diverse sources;

− Search engines, and Google in particular, play an increasingly important

gate-keeping role – shaping winners and losers, though this function

varies between the four topics investigated and the type of search

engine, as different search engines yield different sources of expertise.

Indeed, the study provided a robust validation of the heterogeneity of

search engines, the qualitative differences among them in terms of

which functionalities they provide, and the apparently different content

and Web spaces they provide in indexing and search services.

− Researchers display significant differences in how they access online

resources (for example, if they go from search to publications, or vice

versa; go from online to offline resources, or vice versa; look for people

or institutions, etc.), which mitigates potentially more systematic impacts

of the Internet on who goes to what sources of expertise;

− There was a US bias in the search engine results, when compared to

the local UK sources that our UK experts consult, though this was more

the case where the research topic prioritised national online resources

(HIV/AIDS public health sites) than for the other three topics.

Secondly, there is an embedded social structure inherent in the distribution and

sharing of resources on the Web. Similar patterns of the centrality of key

resources, their connectivity and the way they are clustered, emerge on the

Web spaces of all six topics. These social networks can be seen as electronic

social networks, and identifying such structures will be of value in designing the

search engine technology of the future.

Thirdly, the qualitative findings of this exploratory research suggests the

potential value of embedding in future search engine technology more ‘user

oriented’ and topic specific functionalities, such as peculiar characteristics of

‘geography and locality’ relevant to the topic. Policy considerations influencing

the distribution of resources as well as the more academic nature of certain

kinds of information on the Web might explain significant differences in the

social networks embedded within these electronic networks.

Methodologically, the study supported the value of using Webmetric analyses

and interviews in a complementary way. For example, we were able to

successfully compare the most heavily linked and highly rated sites for each

topic with those that researchers regularly accessed and used. The following

sections provide a more detailed discussion of findings within and across the

two methodological approaches.

I. Results of the Webmetric Analysis

The core empirical data set was created from Webmetric research tools, which

enabled us to crawl the Web for links to and from sites to analyse patterns of

access on the World Wide Web to scientific and technical knowledge in the six

broad global issue areas of scientific research: ‘Climate change’, ‘Poverty’,

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