Computer Engineering Commons^™

Attitudes And Behaviors In Online Communities: Empirical Studies Of The Effects Of Social, Community, And Individual Characteristics, Richard Kumi

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Online communities and communities of practice bring people together to promote and support shared goals and exchange information. Personal interactions are important to many of these communities and one of the important outcomes of personal interactions in online communities and communities of practice is user-generated content. The three essays in the current study examines behavior motivation in online communities and communities of practice to understand how Social and personal psychological factors, and user-generated influence attitudes, intentions and behaviors in online communities.

The first essay addresses two research questions. First, how does Social capital influence exchange and combination behaviors in online …

Identifying Emerging Researchers Using Social Network Analysis, Syed Masum Billah

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Finding rising stars in academia early in their careers has many implications when hiring new faculty, applying for promotion, and/or requesting grants. Typically, the impact and productivity of a researcher are assessed by a popular measurement called the h-index that grows linearly with the academic age of a researcher. Therefore, h-indices of researchers in the early stages of their careers are almost uniformly low, making it difficult to identify those who will, in future, emerge as influential leaders in their field. To overcome this problem, we make use of Social network analysis to identify young researchers most likely to become …