My paper, “Build, manage, and evaluate: Information practices and personal reputations on social media platforms”, has been published in Information Research. The paper is co-authored with my PhD supervisors, Professor Hazel Hall, Peter Cruickshank, and Alistair Lawson and was first presented at the 10th Conceptions of Library and Information Science (CoLIS) conference in Ljubliana, Slovenia in June 2019.
The research draws from some of the findings from my doctoral investigation on the use of online information in the management of personal reputation and considers a single research question: “How do information behaviours related to personal reputation building, management, and evaluation on social media reflect citation practices related to the building, management, and evaluation of academic reputation?”
Access the full text on the Information Research website here.
ABSTRACT:
Introduction. The broad theme of this paper is the use of information to build, manage and evaluate personal reputations. It reports the findings of a study that considered the extent to which social media users replicate in online environments the established information practices of academics when they assess their peers. The three platforms considered are Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.
Method. A multi-step data collection process was implemented for this work. Forty-five UK-based social media users kept journals and took part in semi-structured interviews.
Analysis. A qualitative analysis of the journal and diary data was undertaken using NVivo10. Information practices were analysed to consider the similarities or difference between social media practices and related practices deployed by academics related to citations.
Results. The findings expose the ways in which social media users build, manage, and evaluate personal reputations online may be aligned to the citation practices of academics.
Conclusions. This work shows where the similarities and differences exist between citation practices and related information practices on social media as related to personal reputations. Broadly, the findings of this research demonstrate that social media users do replicate in informal online environments the established information practices of academics.
Below are the slides from my presentation at the CoLIS conference to help visualise the paper a bit. And, as always, please get in touch if you have any questions about this paper or my other research.