This document discusses new digital research literacies for legal educators. It outlines scholarly peer networks like SSRN and ResearchGate that can help build an academic profile. Publishing platforms like blogs, slideshares, and Twitter are discussed as ways to disseminate research. The document also discusses altmetrics as an alternative to traditional metrics like citation counting and journal impact factors. It provides examples of how digital research can transform features like replicability, mutability, and connectivity. Finally, it encourages legal educators to engage with emerging technologies to collaborate openly and consider diverse voices.

1. New media &
digital research literacies
for legal educators
Professor Paul Maharg
paulmaharg.com/slides

2. preview
1. Digital research literacies
2. Scholarly peer networks: SSRN, Academia, ResearchGate,
Google Scholar, LinkedIn, CarbonMade
3. Publishing platforms: blogs, Slideshare, Twitter, Buzzfeed
4. Bibliometrics > altmetrics
5. Some research…
6. Some personal conclusions

3. digital media
Pro Con
Wide dissemination, remains at a more or
less fixed place for readers to return &
download, etc
Can be time-consuming & addictive; are
you getting to the people you want to
read your stuff?
Gathering, sorting, archiving of digital
information very useful
Apps disappear or go corporate
Builds academic profile through altmetrics Can encourage narcissism & grandiosity if
used as vanity projects
Facilitates the Open – open access, open
education, OE resources
Privacy can be an issue (cf Facebook)
Supports knowledge as a public good Do we want that? Should knowledge
always be public?
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4. deeper issues
1. What’s digital?
Specific devices, networks, assemblages? Technical, educational, research
affordances, modes of text and search, specific skills, competences, practices,
environments?
2. How does digital alter social?
Eg distributed communities, socio-material understandings, means of production
& modes of use
3. How does digital (+ social) alter literacies?
Eg artefacts and practices, formal and informal contexts of research, visual
artefacts, digital curation.
4. How does digital encourage metricization of our working lives, and what can we
do about it?
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5. transforming features of digital…
• Replicability
• Mutability
• Connectivity
• Instantaneity (& the ‘nearly now’)
• Portability
• Identity
(Jones 2013, 162-65)
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6. so what about our staff pages?
• Almost no social sharing
• Static pages
• No reference to academic tools or modes of
communication
• Social media-free
• Occasionally useful for linking to repositories to view
‘versions of record’. Or email addresses…
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7. scholarly peer networks
• SSRN
• Google Scholar: http://bit.ly/1umHCmP
• Academia: bit.ly/1oaK9hj
• ResearchGate: http://bit.ly/10k3dyE
• LinkedIn: http://linkd.in/1DSQvnn
• Carbonmade: http://bit.ly/1GfMZY4
• Zotero
• Evernote
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8. publishing platforms: blogging
http://paulmaharg.com
17.3.2005 > present. Used for:
• Dissemination of ideas & research
• Construction yard for sections of papers & articles
• Sky-writing (Steven Harnard)
• Identity formation
• On Blawg
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9. publishing platforms: blogging
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10. publishing platforms: slidedecks & Twitter
http://slideshare.net/paulmaharg
Used for:
•Dissemination of slidedecks
•Set alerts for others’ presentations
•Re Twitter, use third-party apps & aggregators, eg
TweetDeck to manage the dataflow
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11. 3 publishing platforms: slidedecks & Twitter

12. 3 publishing platforms: slidedecks & Twitter

13. some slideshare stats
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14. 3

15. publishing platforms: Buzzfeed
(surely not Buzzfeed?)
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16. Yes, Buzzfeed
http://bit.ly/1JFKYp0
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17. altmetrics
See altmetrics.org:
‘the creation and study of new metrics based on the
Social Web for analyzing and informing scholarship’
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18. existing impact: how we are judged
Existing filters:
• Peer-review
• Citation counting
eg h-index
• Journal Impact Factor (JIF)
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19. existing impact: how we are judged
• … of a journal: A measure of the average number of citations
to articles published in science & social science journals in a 3-
year period (Eugene Garfield, ISI). Calculated annually for the
journals indexed in Thomson Reuters Journal Citation
Reports.
• Calculation: number of times articles were cited in indexed
journals divided by number of items published in journals.
• Pressure on authors to enter high-ranked journals
• Pressure on journals to stay high-ranked
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20. existing impact: how we are judged…
BUT…
•JIF is easily gamed:
http://bit.ly/1uYDPgE
•And gives inaccurate views of
journal quality:
http://bit.ly/1Ddo8Be
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21. … hence altmetrics
‘With altmetrics, we can crowdsource peer-review. Instead of waiting months for two
opinions, an article’s impact might be assessed by thousands of conversations and
bookmarks in a week. In the short term, this is likely to supplement traditional peer-
review, perhaps augmenting rapid review in journals like PLoS ONE, BMC Research
Notes or BMJ Open. In the future, greater participation and better systems for
identifying expert contributors may allow peer review to be performed entirely from
altmetrics.
Unlike the JIF, altmetrics reflect the impact of the article itself, not its venue. Unlike
citation metrics, altmetrics will track impact outside the academy, impact of
influential but uncited work, and impact from sources that aren’t peer-reviewed.
Some have suggested altmetrics would be too easy to game; we argue the opposite.’
altmetrics: a manifesto -- http://bit.ly/1tldeJA
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22. what might altmetrics look like?
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Altmetrics: a manifesto – http://bit.ly/1tldeJA

23. …which is also a related to the Open movement,
in data & scholarship
Eg
•Datacite
•DASH (Harvard)
•Caselaw
•Ravel Law
Further reading:
http://bit.ly/1LgPtbo

24. So why digital research literacy?
For all these reasons & more…
• Quantify and document research impact
• Justify future requests for funding
• Quantify return on research investment
• Discover how research findings are being used
• Identify similar research projects
• Identify possible collaborators
• Determine if research findings are duplicated, confirmed, corrected, improved or repudiated
• Determine if research findings were extended
• Confirm that research findings were properly attributed/credited
• Demonstrate that research findings are resulting in meaningful health outcomes
• Discover community benefit as a result of research findings
• Progress reports
• Promotion dossiers
Adapted
from
the
Becker
Model,
@
https://becker.wustl.edu/impact-assessment/model
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25. results from analytical literature?
• ‘Social network analysis revealed that discipline was influential in defining
community structure, while academic seniority was linked to the position
of nodes within the network.’
• ‘The survey revealed a contradiction between academics use of the sites
and their position within the networks the sites foster. Junior academics
were found to be more active users of the sites, agreeing to a greater
extent with the perceived benefits, yet having fewer connections and
occupying a more peripheral position in the network.’
Jordan (2014)
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26. • ‘Using data from the Teaching, Research, and International Policy project on peer-
reviewed publications between 1980 and 2006, we show that women are
systematically cited less than men after controlling for a large number of variables
including year of publication, venue of publication, substantive focus, theoretical
perspective, methodology, tenure status, and institutional affiliation.’
• ‘Articles authored by women are systematically less central than articles authored
by men, all else equal. This is likely because (1) women tend to cite themselves
less than men, and (2) men (who make up a disproportionate share of IR scholars)
tend to cite men more than women. This is the first study in political science to
reveal significant gender differences in citation patterns and is especially
meaningful because citation counts are increasingly used as a key measure of
research's quality and impact.’ Maliniak et al 2013
results from analytical literature?
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27. what can legal education researchers do?
• Acknowledge the ceaseless emergence of
technology, and engage with it as widely as our time
& energy allows
• Base our practices on community and collaboration
• Be open to diverse, global voices
• Be Open in teaching and research
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28. references
BIALL Legal Information Literacy Statement,
http://www.biall.org.uk/data/files/BIALL_Legal_Information_Literacy_Statement_July_2012.pdf
Cheston, C.C., Flickinger, T.E., Chisholm, M.S. (2013). Social media use in medical education: A systematic review, Academic
Medicine. 88, 6, 893-901.
Holmes, K. (2014). Going beyond bibliometric and altmetric counts to understand impact.
http://libraryconnect.elsevier.com/articles/2014-05/going-beyond-bibliometric-and-altmetric-counts-understand-
impact#sthash.4stanFFN.dpuf
Jones, C. (2013). The digital university: a concept in need of definition. In R. Goodfellow, M.R.Lea, eds, Literacy in the Digital
University. Critical Perspectives on Learning, Scholarship and Technology. SRHE, Routledge, London, 162-172.
Jordan, K. (2014). Academics and their online networks: Exploring the role of academic social networking sites. Available at:
http://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/4937/4159
Konkiel, S. (2014) Playing with altmetrics. http://theresearchwhisperer.wordpress.com/2014/10/21/altmetrics-services/#more-
3175
Maliniak, D., Powers, R., Walter, B.F. (2013). The gender citation gap in International Relations. International Organization, 67, 4,
889-922. http://bit.ly/1yYFxym
SCONUL Seven Pillars of Information Literacy (2011). The Core
Model.http://www.sconul.ac.uk/sites/default/files/documents/coremodel.pdf
Veletsianos, G. (2013). Open practices and identity: Evidence from researchers and educators’ social media participation. British
Journal of Education Technology, 44, 4, 639-51.

29. Email:paul.maharg@anu.edu.au
Web: paulmaharg.com
Slides: paulmaharg.com/slides