Social Software in Academia: Users' Acceptance of Web 2.0 Services

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Apr 30

There are some interesting findings and statistics in the findings from this research paper, Social Software in Academia: Three Studies on Users' Acceptance of Web 2.0 Services, presented at the WWW2010 event.

From section 4.1.2 of the paper, "How often do you use the following services for scientific research?' with answer possibilities : 'always', 'often', 'rarely', 'never', and 'I do not know this service'...Here Wikipedia and other wikis were considered in contrast to other traditional research tools and Google or other Web search engines. Only 7.6% of survey participants claimed that they never use Wikipedia for this purpose, 20.6% 'always' use Wikipedia for scientific research talks (this is rank 4 behind Google with 35.6%, Libraries with 33.8% and online library catalogs with 29.9%), another 45.3% use it 'often'." This particular quote pertained to student usage of Wikipedia but faculty awareness and use of Wikipedia is also covered in the paper.

There is a good deal of meat in the paper, brought to our attention by Gary Price of the ResourceShelf. His is a particularly useful resource and one that has significant credibility in the information community.