My Research, its Potential, and its Contribution to SCIT Mike Thelwall

My Research: Subject  Cybermetrics (started in 1999) Part of Information Science Part of UoA 61 Library and Information Management Overlaps with UoA 25 Computer Science Related to Science Policy, Cultural Studies, Statistics, Mathematics

My Research: Subject  Cybermetrics is the application of quantitative methods to study Internet information  Research involves using a web crawler to collect data from the web, statistics to analyse the data and the other subjects to formulate hypotheses and analyse the results

My Research: Subject  Example: most recent paper published: “A layered approach for investigating the topological structure of communities in the Web” Crawled the web sites of all universities in the UK, Australia and New Zealand Devised a modification of Flake’s Community Identification Algorithm Identified communities in the three Webs (running the algorithm in parallel on 40 computers for 2 weeks) Showed that significant community structures are present in academic webs, if the correct parameters are used Education and Computer Science are “topic breakers”

Achievements  Head of a highly successful research group, helping many members of staff to publish and become research active  56 journal articles published  98 publications in total  Three successful external funding bids EU WISER project Canadian SSHRC Emerald (private publisher)

Achievements  Editorial board member for 2 journals and 1 book series  Reviewer for 9 journals  Reviewer for AHRB  External examiner for 2 Computer Science PhDs  ‘Highly Commended’ for papers published in ASLIB/Emerald publications in 2002 awarded to: Evidence for the existence of geographic trends in university web site interlinking

Achievements  Supervisor for 2 PhD students  Quoted in Nature Science Update “Search engine makes social calls”  5 invited talks at other institutions  20 collaborating researchers outside Wolverhampton in 4 continents over the past two years

Evidence of International Excellence  One of the most successful information science researchers in the world over the past four years?  Use the Research Assessment Exercise criteria to judge this – driven by the quality of publications

Evidence of International Excellence  What do you have to do to be classified as 5* internationally excellent in UoA 61?  Publish in the Journal of Documentation, JASIST, or Information Processing & Management (Oppenheim, 1995)  Benchmark: a total of three papers in the above three journals over a five year period

Evidence of International Excellence  My publication record… JASIST: 7 papers in 5 years Journal of Documentation: 7 papers in 5 years Information Processing & Management: 3 papers in 5 years Overall: 17 papers in 5 years in the top 3 journals  Is this the best track record (for these journals) of any academic in the World?

Evidence of International Excellence  Citation analysis –possibly used in next RAE  Duplicating the methods of Oppenheim (2000) gives 191 ISI citations to articles published in the last 4 years  Ranked 3 rd out of 338 in the UK  If my 2004/5 citation rate continues the total will be close to 1,000 by 2008, one of the top in the world

Evidence of International Excellence  Lifetime achievement statistics (He & Spink, 2002) Joint 6 th highest foreign author in JASIST Joint 2 nd in the Journal of Documentation (if foreign)

Future Plans: Aims  4-6 researchers submitted to UoA 61 for the next RAE (or equivalent) and achieving a 5* rating  1 successful major (>£100,000 to UoW) external funding project per year  Successful management and completion of external projects  Information Science MSc options

Future Plans: Aims  Wider dissemination of general research skills within SCIT and the University  Business partnerships leading to the commercial exploitation of new research

A key player in a winning team Any Questions?