The Trajectory of Current and Future Knowledge Market Research: Insights from the First KredibleNet Workshop

Abstract

To this point, no collaborative research environment has been remotely effective at allowing scholars interested in researching trust, authority, authorship, and roles on social media knowledge markets to seamlessly transition between engaging other researchers, uploading and analyzing data, and reporting findings for the world to observe. Theories that continue, rather than ignore, social and mass media theory, are yet to be developed. In our increasingly global society, with its growing emphasis on collaborative work, this is a critical gap in the research process. This chapter proposes a carefully designed approach and framework that would more actively listen to the needs of the research community in order to offer the perspective, resources, and tools that would best allow them to address the most important research problems of today and of tomorrow in the fields of authorship, roles, and credibility. Based upon present and future research needs expressed by a panel of leading researchers attending the KredibleNet workshop at Purdue University in April 2014, the authors propose the development of a new approach that problematizes the lack of theoretical coherence of current work, that advocates for strong multidisciplinary collaboration, for funding of nonintuitive research agendas and for the development of collaborative platforms that would support scholars at all stages of the scholarly process.

The authors thank the participants to the first KredibleNet workshop for the valuable input offered to the final roundtable that constituted the starting point for this chapter.