Spatial Distribution Of Scholarly Information On Internet

Internet is becoming a more and more important media for scientific researchers. Many people accepted the opinions of The Death of Distance and The World is Flat, which were published several years ago. In fact, the influence of distance doesn’t disappear, though Internet is widely used in the world. As for scholarly information on the Internet, academic activities still bear a close relationship with its spatial distribution. Reasonable spatial distribution of scholarly information on the Internet must play a positive role in academic activities. Otherwise, digital divide will be intensified.This dissertation attempts to make a systematic study of the spatial distribution of scholarly information on the Internet by applying relevant theories and methods of Informetrics, Spatial Econometrics, Spatial Statistics etc. Following the pattern of present problems, analyzing and solving problems, this dissertation consists of three parts and 9 chapters.PartⅠ:chapter 0. The first chapter is a review about information distribution. It also introduces the framework and research methods of it and then makes a brief introduction of difficult points and some innovation points.PartⅡ:Chapter 1 to 6. This part is the core of the dissertation. Chapl lists basic theories of this research, such as Bradford’s Law of Scattering, Zipf’s Law, Lotka’s Law and Knowledge Spillovers. Several concepts, such as information distribution, spatial distribution and spatial diffusion, are given in chapl too. In chap2, four aspects of scholarly information on the Internet are discussed. Four aspect are as follows:what are the organization methods of it, which are the information types of it, what are the communication model of it and how to find it.The properties of scholarly information, scientific researchers and external environment, which are the main influential factors of the distribution of scholarly information on the Internet, are analyzed in chap3. How to measure the spatial distribution of scholarly information on the Internet is the major content of chap4 and several indexes are given in this chapter too. Statistic model is discussed in chap5. Chap6 is demonstration research. The empirical analysis of the data collected from search engine and database confirmed the rationality and validity of the method.PartⅢ, chapter 7 and 8. According to the study in this dissertation, the author puts forward optimal strategies in chap7. The last chapter summarizes all the work done and points out the imperfections of the research work and looks forward to the future research work.The innovative points of this dissertation are as follows. Firstly, quantitative methods were used when analyzing the reasons leading to the spatial distribution of scholarly information on the Internet. Secondly, this is a cross-disciplinary research of Informetrics, Spatial Econometrics and Spatial Statistics. Spatial effects, just as spatial autocorrelation, are considered in this dissertation. Finally, ArcGIS and GeoDa, as spatial analysis software are used, which are not only statistic software but also visualization tools.This dissertation is a part of the project supported by NSFC (Code NO.70673071).