Scholarly Communication and Documentary Fragmentations in the Public Space: a Functional Citation Study

Abstract

This paper studies how academic content published in Open Edition.org, an online publication platform in the Social Sciences and Humanities is re-appropriated by members of the public. Our research is therefore concerned with the public appropriation of science and Open science. After extracting the contexts of citation of these content and mapping them, we propose a typology of citation functions as well as of citers (their origins and types). Our preliminary results indicated that academic literature is repurposed and cited by members of the public mainly as scientific warrant (support for their argumentation). We also found that academic content is cited in all types of web documents including blogs, press releases, book reviews, newspaper articles, scientific articles, discussion forums, library catalogs, government agencies or ministries. Finally, we looked at that the elapsed time between the publication of an academic content and its citation in the public arena and found that this follows the already observed citations patterns within the scientific community (sleeping beauties, long tail, unexpected reader, silent conversation).

Keywords

• social sciences and humanities
• scientific communication
• citation patterns
• social uses of citation
• information visualisation