New Trends and the Evaluation of Scholarship

New Trends and the Evaluation of Scholarship

Introduction

The advancement of information and communication technologies over the past decade, particularly the growth of the Internet, the World Wide Web (Web), and email, have had an impact on how scholarship is conducted and are re-defining many aspects of scholarly communication. Interdisciplinarity, collaboration, and disintermediation are three aspects of scholarly communication that are on the increase as a result of the advancement of information and communication technology. The trend towards increased interdisciplinary and collaborative scholarship, combined with the disintermediation of traditional journal publishers and publishing as more scholarship is made directly available electronically, make the evaluation of scholarship more difficult. This paper will briefly examine these trends, the advancement of new technology, and how they may effect the evaluation of scholarship.

Backgound

Changes in scholarly communication and the evaluation of scholarship are discussed in this paper in the context of several concepts. Operationalizing the key concepts used in this discussion results in the following definitions. Scholarship is both the work, and the result of the work, performed by scholars to produce new information to be added to a body of knowledge. The addition of scholarly work to a body of knowledge is accomplished by communicating, usually in writing, either in print or digital format, the findings produced by scholarship to the wider, usually academic, community. Borgman (2000) defines scholarly communication as “…the study of how scholars in any field…use and disseminate information through formal and informal channels” (p. 144). Evaluating scholarship entails examining the written results of scholarly work, but it also includes examination of the methods and procedures used to produce that work.

Interdisciplinarity refers to the increasing trend of scholars to participate in research and publication activities with other scholars outside of their own academic discipline. Webster’s online defines discipline as “a branch of knowledge or teaching; the subject matter of instruction” (Webster’s, 2003). “Interdisciplinarity is a term which refers to the integration of concepts across different disciplines” (Wikipedia, 2003). The most complete definition found was one quoted in Lattuca (2002) and specifies the different types of interdisciplinary actions that are at the core of interdisciplinarity.

Interdisciplinary – An adjective describing the interaction among two or more different disciplines. This interaction may range from simple communication of ideas to the mutual integration of organizing concepts, methodology, procedures, epistemology, terminology, data, and organization of research and education in a fairly large field. An