Academics earn street cred with TED Talks but no points from peers

And as far as boosting citations via TED presentations, the researchers looked at citations for an academic for three years before and after TED presentation and found no hike in citations after appearing on the TED website.

“The suggestion is that TED doesn’t promote a scientist’s work within their own community or that any positive impact is offset by peers questioning the presenter’s motivations,” Sugimoto said.

The team used both bibliometric (most commonly, academic journal citation analysis) and webometric techniques, which include biodirectional hyperlink analysis of Web-based products.

Co-authors with Sugimoto on “Scientists Popularizing Science: Characteristics and Impact of TED Talk Presenters,” were IU doctoral student Andrew Tsou; Mike Thelwall of University of Wolverhampton, United Kingdom; Vincent Lariviere and Benoit Macaluso of Universite de Montreal and the Universite du Quebec a Montreal; and Philippe Mongeon, Universite de Montreal. The new research appeared in PLoS ONE.

The work was funded by the Digging Into Data initiative, a multinational funding program to promote “big data” research. Teams must be composed of scholars from at least two countries and receive funding from one of a number of potential national scholars. The U.S. portion of this grant was funded by the National Science Foundation. For more about the initiative, see this previous press release on IU’s Digging Into Data scholars.

As a researcher studying doctoral education and scholarly communication in the IU Bloomington School of Informatics and Computing, Sugimoto is interested in the public’s perception of science, how the public consumes scientific information and the resulting relationship with the public’s perception and knowledge of science. She received a Ph.D. in information and library science from University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2010 and came to IU the same year.