The present analysis looks at how scientists use the Internet for informal scientific communication. It investigates the relationship between several explanatory variables and Internet use in a cross-section of scientists from seven European countries and five academic disciplines (astronomy, chemistry, computer science, economics, and psychology). The analysis confirmed some of the results of previous U.S.-based analyses. In particular, it corroborated a positive relationship between research productivity and Internet use. The relationship was found to be nonlinear, with very productive (nonproductive) scientists using the Internet less (more) than would be expected according to their productivity. Also, being involved in collaborative R&D and having large networks of collaborators is associated with increased Internet use. In contrast to older studies, the analysis did not find any equalizing effect whereby higher Internet use rates help to overcome the problems of potentially disadvantaged researchers. Obviously, everybody who wants to stay at the forefront of research and keep upto-date with developments in their research fields has to use the Internet. stress the interrelatedness of traditional (face-to-face, phone) and computer-mediated communication, they also expect that the new technology provides the technological basis for changing relationships, for "a movement from tightly-bounded, highly-structured bureaucracies to social networks with amorphous boundaries and shifting sets of work relationships" (Koku et al., p. 1772). Hilgartner (1995 proposes that new biomolecular databases also give birth to "new communication regimes." Several others see the "collaboratory" as a new form of large-scale collaboration with a virtual lab in Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development [OECD], 1998). Opposing these views, Gläser (2003) argues that the Internet leaves the social structure of scientific communities unchanged, but reforms their work practices. In particular, he points to the possibility of a new and more rapid communalization of knowledge production related to the publication (and possibly production) of raw data. However, further analyses are necessary to broaden the empirical knowledge on how the Internet is used for communication and how this relates to social structures in science. Hence, the present analysis attempts to deepen and improve our understanding of how the Internet is currently used in different scientific communities. In particular, it explores the characteristics of Internet proponents and resistors. Is there a digital divide between younger and older, male and female, established and less-known scientists? What is the relationship between research productivity and Internet use and how does collaborative research affect it? Is there still a gap between the social sciences and the natural sciences? Do the patterns of informal scientific communication differ between countries? As the Internet is primarily a technology that facilitates the transmission of information, we will ...

The combination of knowledge and skills from different backgrounds or research cultures is often considered good for science. This paper describes the extent to which academic research teams in the life sciences draw on knowledge from different research cultures and how this is related to their research performance. We distinguish between international collaboration of research teams from different countries and cultural diversity of research teams resulting from team members with different countries of origin. Our results show that the most successful teams have a moderate level of cultural diversity; in addition, successful teams engage in collaboration activities with teams from other European countries and the US leading to joint publications. These results have implications for research team management and for research policy, in particular in relation to supporting measures for mobile scientists. 1 These two modes are a useful simplification of all possible interaction types along the dimensions of duration, distance and interaction intensity (see Fiol and O'Connor, 2005).

In recent years, a considerable body of Webometric research has used hyperlinks to generate indicators for the impact of Web documents and the organizations that created them. The relationship between this Web impact and other, offline impact indicators has been explored for entire universities, departments, countries, and scientific journals, but not yet for individual scientists-an important omission. The present research closes this gap by investigating factors that may influence the Web impact (i.e., inlink counts) of scientists' personal homepages. Data concerning 456 scientists from five scientific disciplines in six European countries were analyzed, showing that both homepage content and personal and institutional characteristics of the homepage owners had significant relationships with inlink counts. A multivariate statistical analysis confirmed that full-text articles are the most linked-to content in homepages. At the individual homepage level, hyperlinks are related to several offline characteristics. Notable differences regarding total inlinks to scientists' homepages exist between the scientific disciplines and the countries in the sample. There also are both gender and age effects: fewer external inlinks (i.e., links from other Web domains) to the homepages of female and of older scientists. There is only a weak relationship between a scientist's recognition and homepage inlinks and, surprisingly, no relationship between research productivity and inlink counts. Contrary to expectations, the size of collaboration networks is negatively related to hyperlink counts. Some of the relationships between hyperlinks to homepages and the properties of their owners can be explained by the content that the homepage owners put on their homepage and their level of Internet use; however, the findings about productivity and collaborations do not seem to have a simple, intuitive explanation. Overall, the results emphasize the complexity of the phenomenon of Web linking, when analyzed at the level of individual pages.

The combination of knowledge and skills from different backgrounds or research cultures is often considered good for science. This paper describes the extent to which academic research teams in the life sciences draw on knowledge from different research cultures and how this is related to their research performance. We distinguish between international collaboration between research teams and international mobility leading to team diversity, where scientists with a background in another country work as members of a team over time. Our results show that the most successful teams both have a moderate level of team diversity and engage in collaboration activities resulting in joint publications with scientists in other countries. These results have implications for research team management and for research policy, in particular in relation to the mobility of scientists.

The present study investigated the relationship between the use of different internet applications and research productivity, controlling for other influences on the latter. The control variables included dummies for country, discipline, gender and type of organization of the respondent; as well as variables for age, recognition, the degree of society-related and careerrelated motivation for research, and the size of the collaboration network. Simple variance analyses and more complex negative binomial hurdle models point to a positive relationship between internet use (for personal communication, information retrieval and information dissemination) and research productivity. However, the results should be interpreted with caution as it was not possible to test the role of the internet against other pre-internet tools which fulfil the same functions. Thus instance it may not be the use of e-mail per se, but the degree of communicating with colleagues that makes a productive scientist.