The Scholarly Knowledge Ecosystem: Challenges and Opportunities for the Field of Information

Abstract

The scholarly knowledge ecosystem presents an outstanding exemplar of the challenges of understanding, improving, and governing information ecosystems at scale. This article draws upon significant reports on aspects of the ecosystem to characterize the most important research challenges and promising potential approaches. The focus of this review article is the fundamental scientific research challenges related to developing a better understanding of the scholarly knowledge ecosystem. Across a range of disciplines, we identify reports that are conceived broadly, published recently, and written collectively. We extract the critical research questions, summarize these using quantitative text analysis, and use this quantitative analysis to inform a qualitative synthesis. Three broad themes emerge from this analysis: the need for multi-sectoral cooperation and coordination, for mixed methods analysis at multiple levels, and interdisciplinary collaboration. Further, we draw attention to an emerging consensus that scientific research in this area should by a set of core human values.