Comunicación de conocimiento. ¿Habilidad de los profesores universitarios?

Abstract

Introduction: All fully information literate people possess a series of skills that are associated with the ability to perform research. University faculty are no exception. Objective: In order to determine to what extent academics of the University of Murcia are fully information literate we look at their research performance measured through their published papers in mainstream journals from 1994 to 2001. Methods: We used the three databases of the Web of Science to identify the output of the University of Murcia faculty. We also used the Journal Citation Reports to assign their subject category to published papers. Results: We identified indexed papers published in mainstream journals. Articles covered by A HCI were few, while papers indexed by SSCI remained constant over the studied period. SCI indexed 1,923 papers from 1994 to 2001; 72% of them were cited. Most papers were published in English by faculty working in centres related to the biological sciences. Disciplines that showed more activity were chemistry, biochemistry molecular biology and neurosciences. Conclusions: We were aware that the databases we used are criticised by their biases. However, we gather evidence that academics of the University of Murcia carry out research mainly in the hard sciences. Also, that academics are information literate: their output is published in mainstream journals, i.e. they have overcome the barriers of knowledge generation and science communication.