Projects

The goal of this project is to understand what impact the mentor-mentee relationship has on the future publication patterns of LIS doctoral students in North America. Related questions we hope to answer are:

The main goal of this project is to build a tool to map and explore the research output of the eight ALA-accredited information schools in Canada, with a focus of the specicific contribution of schools in shaping the Canadian LIS research landscape.

Participatory knowledge production modes that allow the integration of perspectives and forms of knowledge can help better understand our complex socio-environmental systems (Alvarado et al., 2020). Several studies have shown that society can meaningfully engage in discussions about science and technology, and that this win-win interaction can contribute to strengthening democracies and decision-making (Reen et al.

This work is a quantitative exploration of archival scholarship that aims to describe the social and topical structure of the field, its evolution, and its relationship with other disciplines.

Main goal This project will identify scholarly work that mentions social justice issues and identify trends in the prevalence of these mentions in the literature. Research questions Some of the questions will be:

This work revisits the relationship between tweets and citations from a new information behavior perspective, where the tweet (and not the tweeted publication) is the unit of analysis. The main question is to determine if, at the individual level, the act of tweeting a given publication is a good predictor of the act of citing that same publication.

While the growth in open access (OA) (Piwowar et al., 2018) in recent years is a positive development towards making research more accessible, the OA landscape is complex and fraught by the academic publishing market, a profitable business controlled by an oligopoly of academic publishers, which consists of a few for-profit companies (Elsevier, SAGE, Springer Nature, Taylor & Francis, and Wiley).

Since they first appeared in 1665, scholarly journals have grown to be the dominant mode of dissemination of research outputs (Csiszar, 2018). The first journals were generalists and covered all areas of science, but the growing number of increasingly specialized researchers led to a segmentation process and the creation of new disciplines and specialized journals (Gingras, 2013).

The goal of this research collaboration between the QSS lab and the Environmental Information Use and Influence (EIUI) group is to contribute to the discussion by providing an empirical basis for assessing the unequal representation and attention that different bodies of literature receive in social media specifically.