Research On The Obsolescence Law Of Network Academic Information

The network academic information, an information unit attached in the computer storage device, transmitted on the internet, recognized, acquired and served for the academic research purpose, has possessed certain academic value, including such formal communication academic information as online journal databases, electronic journals, electronic books, opening access journals, informal communication academic information on blog, wiki, forum, seminar group, email and so on, and semi-formal communication academic information on websites of university, research institute, government and so on.Since the 1990s, many researchers have relied more on the network academic information in the acquisition of academic information. Meanwhile the utilization ratio of the network academic information is also increasing along with the growth of resources numbers. As an important component of modern science communication system, the network academic information is playing a more and more vital role. But the rapid obsolescence of the network academic information has given rise to a sharply reduced value and a restricted display of it. Triggered by the network information management and the network society demand, webometrics comes into being with its primary purpose to find out its new characteristics, the quantitative relations and the inherent laws through the network information measurement research, to provide essential quota basis and the theory support for the network information’s ordering organization and the reasonable distribution as well as the standard and scientific management of network information resource. The network academic information obsolescence law is the important theory component of webometrics, but so far there have been so few research achievements in the network academic information obsolescence law at home and abroad. Under the above background, on the ground of interdisciplinary foundation, embarking on the essence of the network academic information obsolescence, this dissertation has conducted an exploratory research on the obsolescence questions of the network academic information with an aim to enrich and consummate our country’s webomeric research through a comprehensive use of the theory of related disciplines and method of scientometrics, informetrics, network communication, statistics and so on.Chapter Zero is an introduction. Embarking on the relation of network academic information and modern science communication, the author has discussed the necessity of information obsolescence research, given a scanning and analysis of research status at home and abroad, determined the research content and outline of this dissertation, and then described the difficulties and innovations of this research.Chapter One introduces the definition and characteristics of network academic information and network academic information obsolescence. Because of many related concepts and different perspectives of definitions, it is necessary to sort out these concepts and understand the intrinsic link among them in order to clearly define the research object. And then a detailed analysis is conducted on the facts that affect information obsolescence and three major indicators including the "best time of use", "half-life" and "Price" index, three measurement methods including "citation analysis", "network link analysis" and "web usage mining method" in the research of network academic information obsolescence.Chapter Two establishes and elaborates a theoretical framework that provides support and evidence to the following research on the basis of the scientific principle that practice should be guided by theory. It demonstrates the philosophical basis, information management basis, network communication and user behavior theory as well as the gray system theory of network academic information obsolescence research.Chapter Three discusses how to choose a proper model in network academic information obsolescence research. Firstly the author analyzes the effect of mathematical models for the research, and then gives a comparative analysis on three kinds of commonly used mathematical models including "regression analysis", "gray model prediction" and "time series analysis". At last a proper model according to the demand of actual research is chosen.Chapter Four is about the network formal communication academic information obsolescence research. The author selects the online journal database as a representative of the network formal communication academic information and gets data through the Chinese Science Citation Database (CSCD) to conduct obsolescence studies from the diachronic and synchronic perspective by means of citation analysis. Research shows that diachronic and synchronic researches are two different perspectives for obsolescence studies. The former derives from the definition of obsolescence, considering the information obsolescence as a dynamic process of value change over time while the latter derives from the half-life measurement and serves a description of obsolescence state. Both have their own different fields of application which are not interchangeable. From the diachronic perspective, the characteristics of the online journal database information obsolescence before 2000 year still abide by the negative exponential law. But after 2000, the characteristics undergo a transformation which no longer follow a negative exponential law, but fit for a linear model. From the synchronic perspective, the characteristics of the online journal database information obsolescence are still the following negative exponential law, but because the development of electronics and network accelerates the academic information delivery, improves the operational efficiency of scientific communication system and makes the new information aging more rapid. Due to the large amount of information contained in the online journal database, long period of back tracking and convenience for retrieval, it better solves the problems of information availability, and therefore increases the use of the old literature and delays the old literature aging speed.Chapter Five is about the research of network informal communication academic information obsolescence. The author selects the academic blog as a representative of the network formal communication academic information and sciencenet blog as the research object, using the personal developed blog information collection and extraction tool SciNet to obtain relevant data and carrying out obsolescence research in the time distribution of blogs and comments from the diachronic and synchronic perspective. The research shows that the value of academic blog’s information will change over time, taking on general characteristics of three stages including a rapid use, fast obsolescence and slow obsolescence. The obsolescence characteristics of the academic blog information have a bearing on the maturity of the platform for network academic information communication. Academic blog information obsolescence process can be described in power function curve. Academic blog information obsolescence speed is much faster than the online journal databases. There are differences in different disciplines of academic blog information obsolescence speed, but the differences are small.Chapter Six is the application of network academic information obsolescence law. The author establishes a web-based academic information communication model composed of information producers, disseminators and users, and proposes management and utilization strategies of network academic information based on information obsolescence.Chapter Seven summarizes all the work done, 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:(1)It gives a systematic study of interdisciplinary related theoretical foundation in academic information obsolescence research, such as network communication theory, user theory, gray system theory and etc to help to open up a new perspective of informetric research.(2)According to the features of network platform, it tries to extend the field of information obsolescence research from the traditional formal communication of academic information to the informal communication of academic information from the perspective of citation analysis and uses comment analysis to carry out the network informal communication academic information obsolescence research by drawing on the idea of citation analysis to take the comments as the value display and transmit of blog.(3)It points out the distinctions and relations between synchronic and diachronic researches in obsolescence research from the perspectives of obsolescence models and indicators.(4)The author has developed a blog information collection and analysis tool SciNet by my own effort. It can capture and download blog page contents and comments to store them into the database.