Scholarly Publishing and Flickr Tags

Recently Elsevier published its vision for the Article of the Future. However, whilst it paid attention to graphical abstracts and integrated audio and video, it failed to mention one of the most important aspects: delays in the publication process. I am joint author on a paper that has just been accepted by the Journal of Librarianship and Information Science, unfortunately it won't be published until 2011!

Angus, E., Stuart, D., & Thelwall, M. (2011, in press).Flickr's potential as an academic image resource: an exploratory study, Journal of Librarianship and Information Science.

Abstract
Many web 2.0 sites are extremely popular and contain vast amounts of content, but how much of this content is useful in academia? This paper investigates the potential use of the popular web 2.0 image site Flickr as an academic image resource. The study identified images tagged with any one of 12 subject names derived from recognised academic subject categories in the three main ISI citation indexes. Image content analysis was used to determine the types of images found, and term-frequency analysis of associated tags was carried out to provide additional insights into the context behind image placement. The results show that Flickr can be used as a resource for subject-specific images in some subject areas; and that non subject-specific images can also prove to be of value for individual academics.

Whilst you won't be able to see the final version for a couple of years, you can nonetheless download the pre-peer-reviewed version here [.doc format].

I have also included a zoomable copy of the poster that the first author took to ISSI 2009 in Brazil for your added enjoyment (thanks to UCL's Google Maps Image Cutter).

This is the group's second article on Flickr Tags, a preprint of the previous article can be found HERE.