a methodology for evaluation of web-based scholarship
There is growing recognition that the paradigms of modern scholarship are shifting with the advent of the World Wide Web and other Internet-based forums. In some specialty areas within the discipline of Information Technology, one frequently hears folkloric wisdom suggesting that the turn-around time for print publication is greater than the useful longevity of the content. This situation increasing pushes the consumer of state-of-the art research toward the web rather than to the library. At some universities the problem of evaluating the quality of peer-reviewed literature has been approached through "citation" data. How often is a given work cited, for example, in Science Citation Abstracts? For evaluating web-based research, we suggest a related criterion for evaluating the "eminence" of scholarship. As of February 2003 [1], Google moved into first place as the most popular search engine in the United States. Google's immediate upsurge in popularity is generally attributed to the observation that its searches tend to reveal desired results. This is probably due to the nature of Google's page evaluation methodology. The relevance of a page to a given query is based on the number of other pages using those query terms that provide hyperlinks to the page in question. Since Google's emergence, other search engines have begun to utilize allied methodologies - essentially bootstrapping on existing works as relevance indicators in ways that, in fact, provide at least one form of "citation data." This paper will examine some related methodologies for evaluating quality of web-based academic work, and will examine some of the potential strengths and pitfalls associated with such methods.
methodology web-based scholarship research peer-review