Science and the Internet

Do psychologists in Germany now search for relevant research publications on the Internet in the same way they did at the end of the 1990s? Does the use of social media in teaching really produce better learning outcomes because of the informal learning potential inherent in social media? Do university students participate more actively as text contributors in bottom-up wikis initiated by their fellow students than they do in top-down wikis initiated by their instructors? What can we do about ethical beliefs pertaining to the use of the Internet in academia that are not in accordance with the law (e.g., a belief that forwarding a digital copy of an article to a colleague is a good thing even if the publishing contract explicitly grants this right to the publisher only)? What are the main motives behind scholarly blogging?

Which groups of scientists are more likely to self-cite their peer-reviewed publications in their blog posts? Can citations in Web 2.0 such as, for example, retweeting on Twitter and social bookmarking on Delicious serve as indicators of the academic impact of a particular scholar? Which bibliometric tools can a scholar rely on in order to keep track of all citations of his or her publications? Will scientifi c texts be soon written by computers instead of human beings? These are some of the most important issues addressed in 21 papers of the present
interdisciplinary volume, which is concerned with the infl uence of the Internet on various scholarly practices in Germany and worldwide.

The editors of this volume are members of the Interdisciplinary Junior Researchers Group
"Science and the Internet" at the Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf, Germany.