WINTER 2012 - National Association of Schools of Public Affairs and ...

Sharing Student Research with the World
rates. In any field, and particularly in the policy/administration realm, certain
issues gain prominence at certain times. Currently the United States of America
is engrossed in the health care reform debate and economic recovery issues. A
few years back, homeland security issues garnered immense attention. Issues
that capture the imagination of administrators, academics, and analysts can
have a huge impact on download rates. The availability of full texts as opposed
to abstracts, the nature of access (paid for by individuals or the library versus
free to all users) to downloadable material, and the multidisciplinary nature of
a database can affect download rates. The present study was cross-sectional in
nature. Although we noticed that download rates were likely to be higher toward
the end of semesters, a thorough longitudinal analysis could provide additional
insights. Budget cycles, academic research cycles, and other administrative
deadlines could potentially influence download rates. Establishing the link
between user type and download rates would also be a useful line of inquiry.
As we try to move this line of work forward, some important issues need
to be given considerable thought and attention. Many scholars are cynical
(understandably so) about the effectiveness of search engines in providing the
most relevant information for their research. Skepticism prevails about the
quality of scholarly communications that pop up in these search engines. As
Dreyfus (2009, p. 10) observes, part of this skepticism arises because hyperlinks
to any body of work can be created by anybody and everybody, since there
is “no authority or agreed upon catalogue system constraining the linker’s
associations.” Dreyfus (2009, p. 12) also observes that the wide availability
of information on the Web through hyperlinks quashes hierarchies, and
information is “now equally accessible and none of which is privileged.” Are
search engines manipulating their algorithms such that certain kinds of scholarly
communications show up more than others? Are these search engines vulnerable
to certain characteristics of online content such that scholarly communications
with certain specific characteristics show up more often than others? How do
search engine dynamics affect quality, the information tradition, transparency,
and equity? Dreyfus (2009) quells some of these controversies by observing
that search engine techniques used by the search engine Google infuse a lot of
optimism into this situation. He remarks that Google has established itself as
one of the most democratic instruments for information retrieval. He explains
(2009, p. 22) that “Google is novel in that it manages to do a syntactic search for
significance by using information about human search to capture the importance
of what it finds without the search algorithm needing to understand the meaning
of what is found.” In other words, Google renders results that approximate an
intelligent, well-informed human search for information. Dreyfus emphasizes
that Google uses a variety of techniques to ensure that the pages it retrieves based
on a user’s query are not only important but are also relevant to the search. He
quotes (2009, p. 23) Google founders Brin and Page’s comment that
Journal of Public Affairs Education 175