When scholars use Knowledge-Step Forums to create Web-Compended Guides to the literature of their fields, paradigm-shifts will occur in the processes of knowledge creation and in graduate education.
- Published
- Accepted
- Subject Areas
- Adaptive and Self-Organizing Systems, Computer Education, Computer Networks and Communications, Digital Libraries, World Wide Web and Web Science
- Keywords
- Compendium, Knowledge-Creation, Stronger Inference, MultiLevel-Format, PrePrint Publishing, Compending-Forum, Knowledge-Step, Compended Literature-Guide, Graduate Education, paradigm-shift
- Copyright
- © 2017 Jewett
- Licence
- This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, reproduction and adaptation in any medium and for any purpose provided that it is properly attributed. For attribution, the original author(s), title, publication source (PeerJ Preprints) and either DOI or URL of the article must be cited.
- Cite this article
- 2017. When scholars use Knowledge-Step Forums to create Web-Compended Guides to the literature of their fields, paradigm-shifts will occur in the processes of knowledge creation and in graduate education. PeerJ Preprints 5:e1568v13 https://doi.org/10.7287/peerj.preprints.1568v13
Abstract
"Publication forms the core structure supporting the development and transmission of scientific knowledge" (Galbraith2015). Yet, with the WorldWideWeb a dominant part of current scientific publication and information-dissemination, internet "publication" is still paper-based in its style and methods. As will become painfully obvious, such a paper-based "publishing model" is NOT adequate for a Web-based world.
Consider that in 2011, an estimated 5,000 peer-reviewed scientific articles were published per day (Outsell2013), and that in 2014 just the English-language scholarly publications on the Web were about 4,900 per day.
In 1980, the distinguished scientist Garrett Hardin wrote [Hardin1980]:"Who can keep up with such a torrent? When I was young and foolish I vowed that I would read all the articles in my small field of science. Discovering that this was impossible, I tried to read all the abstracts. That, too, proved too much. Now I know that I cannot even read all the titles."
To help reduce scholarly information-overload, this article proposes using Knowledge-Step Forums for the purpose of creating a new type scholarly publication, Web-based Compendia. Each Compendium is about a very narrow topic and is presented in a MultiLevel Format. When all these features are combined, the scholarly article is called a Knowledge-Step Compendium, and it is posted on the Web by the scholar, either on an institutional server, or on one of many web-hosting servers. Web-search engines will be automatically notified about the new posting (and later changes, too).
Forum-Compendors need not be a senior faculty member (as is the case in traditional literature-reviews), but can be pre-docs, post-docs, and senior medical/surgical residents. These graduate-students will be aided by their mentors and online experts to create these Knowledge-Step Compendia. All participants (students and faculty) will be motivated by their own self-interest and everyone gains from the activity, which self-organizes groups of like-minded scholars. Such groups can be the basis for early reviews of new data, for discovering new ideas, and for finding jobs.
Knowledge-Step Forums will speed publication on the Web because it will easily support Publication of Preprints using the software's automatic collection of online "peer-review" comments.
In order for the Internet to be an efficient searchable repository of current and developing knowledge, one additional feature will be needed: ForwardLinks must be available in any given publication to those articles that, in the future, cite the given publication, as fully described in a Supplement to this article. Open-source software for this functionality should be on all Web-servers that contain scholarly articles, so as to make the WWW a distributed web full of linkages, of both ForwardLinks and RetroLinks.
Author Comment
Since the last version, the following were modified: 1. Added a new Figure (7). 2. Added indications that the Web as a Knowledge-Repository will be across many servers. 3. Added description of the need for ForwardLink programming for a complete Repository. 4. Changed the title to include the impacts on knowledge creation and graduate education. 5. Added new quotes from Hardin, Rennie.