The Chronicle: 6/15/2007: The New Metrics of Scholarly Authority

Michael Jensen is director of strategic Web communications for the National Academies.

In the Web 3.0 world, we will also start seeing heavily computed reputation-and-authority metrics, based on many of the kinds of elements now used, as well as on elements that can be computed only in an information-rich, user-engaged environment. Given the inevitable advances in technology, remarkable things are likely to happen. In a world of unlimited computer processing, Authority 3.0 will probably include (the list is long, which itself is a sign of how sophisticated our new authority makers will have to be):

Prestige of the publisher (if any).
Prestige of peer prereviewers (if any).
Prestige of commenters and other participants.
Percentage of a document quoted in other documents.
Raw links to the document.
Valued links, in which the values of the linker and all his or her other links are also considered.
Obvious attention: discussions in blogspace, comments in posts, reclarification, and continued discussion.
Nature of the language in comments: positive, negative, interconnective, expanded, clarified, reinterpreted.
Quality of the context: What else is on the site that holds the document, and what's its authority status?
Percentage of phrases that are valued by a disciplinary community.
Quality of author's institutional affiliation(s).
Significance of author's other work.
Amount of author's participation in other valued projects, as commenter, editor, etc.
Reference network: the significance rating of all the texts the author has touched, viewed, read.
Length of time a document has existed.
Inclusion of a document in lists of "best of," in syllabi, indexes, and other human-selected distillations.
Types of tags assigned to it, the terms used, the authority of the taggers, the authority of the tagging system.

None of those measures could be computed reasonably by human beings. They differ from current models mostly by their feasible computability in a digital environment where all elements can be weighted and measured, and where digital interconnections provide computable context.

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The Chronicle: 6/15/2007: The New Metrics of Scholarly Authority