GIT Awarded Mellon Foundation Grant |
||
|---|---|---|
|
The Georgia Institute of Technology has received a $282,000 grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation for a study by Mark McCabe, Assistant Professor, School of Economics, that measures the impact of digitization and online availability of journals on citations. Since their introduction over a decade ago, digital technologies have transformed the way information markets operate. This research project's objective is to examine whether these new technologies have deepened and/or broadened access to the scientific literature. Mark McCabe, Assistant Professor, School of Economics, along with Christopher Snyder, Professor, Dartmouth College, and Roger Schonfeld, Director of Research, at Ithaka (a non-profit organization in New York City), propose to examine whether new technologies developed to store and transmit digital information have increased the impact of the scholarly and scientific literature. By examining the citation patterns associated with 300 peer-reviewed journals selected from the fields of biology, economics/business, and history, they intend to measure the impact of digitization and online availability on citation patterns for articles published over the past half century or more. Existing studies of this relationship generally examine content published during the last decade. Furthermore, the study will be the first to control for potential selection biases in the data. This requires identifying natural experiments that control for the possibility that changing citation rates are due at least in part to a journal's changing quality over time, and not just due to the easier access that digitization and online availability offer. These natural experiments will be analyzed using econometric methods. Because this research project is part of a larger, continuing effort to understand how information markets behave in a digital environment, the researchers expect that the results will have important implications for related scholarship. An international workshop will be organized near the end of the grant period that examines the project results, and explores their broader significance for scientific communication and innovation strategies in the private and public spheres. For additional information, please contact: Professor Mark J. McCabe |
|
|
|
||
 |
 |
 |
|