![\"scholarly-record\"](\"https:\/\/blog.oclc.org\/next\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/09\/scholarly-record.jpg\")
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Literary criticism is not new. Conducting it via Twitter is.<\/p>\n
In early 2016, distinguished Shakespearean scholar Brian Vickers published The One King Lear<\/em><\/a>, a volume intended to address, and put to rest, a point of scholarly debate suggesting the play may have been revised after its initial publication. Another scholar, Holger Syme, found Vickers\u2019 book wanting and shared his criticism in a series of 500+ tweets. Vickers, in turn, found Syme\u2019s critique wanting, retorting<\/a>: \u201cHe trivializes literary criticism, reducing it to attention-catching sound bites. Is this the way to go?\u201d<\/p>\n In a print-based world, Syme\u2019s criticism would have appeared as a formal article in a traditional journal.\u00a0 Not so in the digital, networked world. Yet no academic library is likely to collect these tweets and curate them.<\/p>\n <\/p>\nLiterary criticism is not new. Conducting it via Twitter is. <\/a><\/span>Share on X<\/a><\/span>\n There is more to the evolution of the scholarly record than a shift in format. Changes in scholarly research and communication practices have led to other significant shifts in the nature and scope of the scholarly record:<\/p>\n Here is a picture, developed by OCLC Research and from The Evolving Scholarly Record<\/a><\/em>, that\u00a0illustrates trends in the evolution of the scholarly record in a digital, networked environment:<\/p>\n Final published outcomes like books and articles (the blue rectangle) are still the coin of the realm for scholarly communication, documentation of findings and establishment of credentials. But these are increasingly accompanied into the scholarly record by additional scholarly outputs generated from the process of scholarly inquiry (red) and from its aftermath (green).<\/p>\n The evolution of the scholarly record is driven largely by changes in scholarly practices. For example, there is greater emphasis on \u201cshowing your work\u201d to facilitate replication of, and building on, published findings. Another example is the migration of scholarly discourse to new online channels; we saw this with the Twitterized literary criticism mentioned earlier, and it is also evident in the use of blogs as a source of scholarly commentary. A recent survey<\/a> suggests that the most common uses of the blogs operated by PLOS are to access \u201cexpert commentaries on current scientific issues\u201d and \u201cin-depth analyses of single research papers.\u201d<\/p>\nChanges in volume, diversity and responsibility<\/h2>\n
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![\"scholarly_record_illustration\"](\"https:\/\/blog.oclc.org\/next\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/09\/scholarly_record_illustration.png\")
<\/a><\/p>\nEnvironment drives evolution<\/h2>\n