Bøker av Michael Thelwall

Many research projects involve analyzing sets of texts from the social web or elsewhere to get insights into issues, opinions, interests, news discussions, or communication styles. For example, many studies have investigated reactions to Covid-19 social distancing restrictions, conspiracy theories, and anti-vaccine sentiment on social media. This book describes word association thematic analysis, a mixed methods strategy to identify themes within a collection of social web or other texts. It identifies these themes in the differences between subsets of the texts, including female vs. male vs. nonbinary, older vs. newer, country A vs. country B, positive vs. negative sentiment, high scoring vs. low scoring, or subtopic A vs. subtopic B. It can also be used to identify the differences between a topic-focused collection of texts and a reference collection. The method starts by automatically finding words that are statistically significantly more common in one subset than another, then identifies the context of these words and groups them into themes. It is supported by the free Windows-based software Mozdeh for data collection or importing and for the quantitative analysis stages. This book explains the word association thematic analysis method, with examples, and gives practical advice for using it. It is primarily intended for social media researchers and students, although the method is applicable to any collection of short texts.

In recent years there has been an increasing demand for research evaluation within universities and other research-based organisations. In parallel, there has been an increasing recognition that traditional citation-based indicators are not able to reflect the societal impacts of research and are slow to appear. This has led to the creation of new indicators for different types of research impact as well as timelier indicators, mainly derived from the Web. These indicators have been called altmetrics, webometrics or just web metrics. This book describes and evaluates a range of web indicators for aspects of societal or scholarly impact, discusses the theory and practice of using and evaluating web indicators for research assessment and outlines practical strategies for obtaining many web indicators. In addition to describing impact indicators for traditional scholarly outputs, such as journal articles and monographs, it also covers indicators for videos, datasets, software and other non-standard scholarly outputs. The book describes strategies to analyse web indicators for individual publications as well as to compare the impacts of groups of publications. The practical part of the book includes descriptions of how to use the free software Webometric Analyst to gather and analyse web data. This book is written for information science undergraduate and Master's students that are learning about alternative indicators or scientometrics as well as Ph.D. students and other researchers and practitioners using indicators to help assess research impact or to study scholarly communication.