Untangling the web of e-Research: Towards a sociology of online knowledge

Journal of Informetrics 3 (2009) 246?260
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Journal of Informetrics
journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/joi
Untangling the web of e-Research: Towards a sociology of
online knowledge
Eric T. Meyer
*
, Ralph Schroeder
Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford, 1 St Giles, Oxford, OX1 3JS, United Kingdom
article info
Article history:
Received 17 September 2008
Received in revised form 4 March 2009
Accepted 17 March 2009
Keywords:
e-Research
e-Science
Cyberinfrastructure
Sociology of knowledge
Sociology of science
abstract
e-Research is a rapidly growing research area, both in terms of publications and in terms of
funding.Inthisarticlewearguethatitisnecessarytoreconceptualizethewaysinwhichwe
seek to measure and understand e-Research by developing a sociology of knowledge based
on our understanding of how science has been transformed historically and shifted into
online forms. Next, we report data which allows the examination of e-Research through a
variety of traces in order to begin to understand how knowledge in the realm of e-Research
has been and is being constructed. These data indicate that e-Research has had a variable
impact in different ¿elds of research. We argue that only an overall account of the scale
and scope of e-Research within and between different ¿elds makes it possible to identify
the organizational coherence and diffuseness of e-Research in terms of its socio-technical
networks, and thus to identify the contributions of e-Research to various research fronts in
the online production of knowledge.
© 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
1. Introduction
e-Research
1
is a rapidly growing area in many ¿elds of scholarship, from the natural sciences to the humanities, as
research moves online and becomes increasingly distributed across larger-scale and multi-institutional collaborations. Such
a shift will pose major challenges to the sociological understanding of science and technology, a ¿eld which has so far relied
heavily on case studies of individual projects instead of, for example, comparing across cases with middle-range theories
(Beaulieu, Scharnhorst, & Wouters, 2007). Other ways of understanding science, such as bibliometrics, scientometrics, and
more recently webometrics (Thelwall, 2007) also face problems in the online world insofar as some outputs (such as the
paper-onlymonographin¿eldssuchasanthropology)maybeinvisibleintermsofonlinetraces,particularlywhencompared
to the highly cited online-only physics article. Finally, some new ways to gauge directions in science, such as mapping of
¿elds in terms of their online presence (Shiffrin & Börner, 2004), have yet to be integrated within the sociology of science
and organizational analyses of knowledge production.
Several essays for this special issue contribute to the rapidly growing area of analyzing online data about knowledge, and
wealsoanalyzee-Researchwiththesetypesofdata.Inaddition,wecons [...]

2009