Page 1 of 12 Research Dissemination and Invocation on the Web Mike Thelwall 1 School of Computing and Information Technology, University of Wolverhampton, 35/49 Lichfield Street, Wolverhampton, WV1 1EQ, UK. Email: mthelwall@wlv.ac.uk Abstract The importance of the Web as a new medium for disseminating and promoting scholarly research is discussed. Particular concern is given to its potential use to provide evidence of wider impact for research than that which can be shown by citation analysis. Recommendations are made for basic strategies for the reporting of the online impact of research leading to the production of what is termed a Web Invocation Portfolio. A conceptual framework is also proposed to help funding and promotion committees assess and compare portfolios. Introduction The Web is an important part of research and education in many parts of the world. It is now widely used as one of the primary means of disseminating research findings through digital libraries and electronic documents such as e-journals (Harter and Ford, 2000; Halliday and Oppenheim, 2001), e-print archives (Harnad and Carr, 2000; Garnet et al, 2002; Town et al., 2002) and online conference proceedings (Goodrum et al., 2001). One recent study found that the online publication of papers in computer science may facilitate higher citation-based impact (Lawrence, 2001). Moreover, according to Weigold (2001), “[the Web] has the potential to dramatically change the relationships of the players in science communication”. It has now become possible for all researchers to use the Web to help promote their research. There is a strong common sense argument for using the Web. Publication is free to academics, at least in the richer countries, and so the main cost would frequently be in the design and production of the promotional material. As discussed below, Web publication gives potential access to new audiences. Moreover, it is fast compared to most print media and admits hypertext-specific devices such as linking to full journal or conference papers from publication lists or summaries, copyright permitting. An additional argument for Web publication is the relative ease with which its online impact can be assessed. Much recent research has investigated the kinds of information about scholarly activities that can be extracted from the Web, particularly Web links (Rousseau, 1997; Ingwersen, 1998; Thelwall, 2000, 2001a-b, 2002a-b). It has been shown in several national university systems that counts of links between universities can produce results that correlate significantly with source and target institutional research productivity (Thelwall, 2001b, 2002a-b; Smith and Thelwall, 2002), which gives some evidence that link counts may be meaningful indicators of scholarly impact. An exercise that attempted to attribute reasons for such link creation found that almost 90% were created for reasons that were associated with scholarly activity but were not online equivalents of bibliographic citations (Wilkinson et al., 2002). As a result, Web links can be used to provide evidence of some aspects of informal online scholarly impact. Another potential source of impact information is the Web server log file, which is potentially also useful but does not appear to have been evaluated in a 1 Thelwall, M. (2002). Research dissemination and invocation on the Web, Online Information Review, 26(6), 413-420.