Virtual Methods

196 • Anne Beaulieu
The latter four databases were studied in a project on trust and databases
open to the public, pursued with Elena Simakova, at the Science Culture
and Communication Programme, University of Bath, UK and the Saïd
Business School, Oxford. For further details on the project, see Simakova
(2002).
3. Tracing such an accession number cannot be done using traditional bibliometric
techniques (that is, these are not included in references) and would
require full text analysis techniques. The same problem is encountered if one
wishes to analyse hyperlinks in scientific articles or references (see Wouters
and De Vries 2004). This challenges database developers and funding agencies
to look beyond traditional bibliometric tools for evaluations of databases
and data-sharing.
4. The study of bookmarks on browsers is another approach to the study of
users’ practices, and requires close contact with individual users (Henwood et
al. 2002).
5. Hyperlinks are relevant to search engines in two ways. First, a number of
search engines use the number of inlinks to determine the relevance of certain
web pages (including Google, which uses the PageRank algorithm). Second,
all search engines use crawlers to collect links for their databases, and these
crawl results are shaped by the hyperlink structures on the Web (Lynch 2001;
Thelwall 2003a).
6. Rogers and Marres (2000) have developed a two-pronged approach to apprehend
these two aspects, though hyperlinks and content words are separated in
the automated data retrieval and analysis process.
7. Han Park participated in some of the data collection and suggested possible
processing of the data, using aspects of social network analysis.
8. The general need for this prompted by the study of infrastructures has been
noted by Star (1999), while Newman (1998) has pointed to the need to
develop ways of navigating shifting network topographies when doing multisited
ethnography.
9. This is a community I have been studying since 1994.
10. The web pages have functions that fall quite squarely into the common definitions
of data-sharing. This was one indication of the ways researchers
shared data, ‘closer to home’, in their own personal or lab spaces. Earlier
fieldwork also showed that researchers have ‘backstage’ areas of their web
sites, which are either accessible internally, to other insiders (of the lab, the
university) or are simply not visible under most circumstances. These are
spaces on web sites that are not hyperlinked, and are therefore ‘protected’ or
made private by virtue of their being unlinked. Researchers may then invite
collaborators to these spaces by providing them with a hyperlink.
11. Research on the use of hyperlinks in published texts has demonstrated that