Digital Scholarship: A Systematic Review of the Literature

The concept of Digital Scolarship -DS-(Borgman, 2007; Pearce, Weller, Scanlon, & Kinsley, 2012; Weller, 2011) defines new forms of academics' professional practices linked to the changing cultural, social and working context of the digital age. However, the empirical research efforts relating this construct seem to emerge in a rather chaotic conceptual and methodological landscape, where several disciplines are contributing. In line with this problem, in this research work the authors have formulated the following operational hypothesis: as a mixed disciplinary topic of research, the DS is at its very first stages with high dispersion and fragmentation of conceptual bases for both further theoretical elaboration as well as empirical research. This report presents hence the topic under analysis, the methodological approach and choices made to tackle the research problem and hypothesis underlying the process of literature reviewing, the results and initial interpretations. In order to obtain evidence supporting the above mentioned hypothesis, the authors carried out a systematic review of literature based on 45 journal articles coming out from 4 relevant scientific information databases (Petticrew & Roberts, 2006). Moreover, several methods where combined, in a sort of methods' triangulation (Mertens & Hesse-Biber, 2012), with the aim of ratifying some of the findings obtained with the main approach. In this case, in a second phase, the authors decided to include a method often adopted in the research area of Scientometrics, that is, the bibliometric maps (van Eck, Waltman, Dekker, & Berg, 2010). The results obtained go into the direction of the main hypothesis formulated: The main problem covered by this topic is the scholars' technological uptake in support of their professional practices relating teaching and research. Moreover, the concept of Digital Scholarship seems to be configured in response to a inter/transdisciplinary problem, that is, from one side the forms that the technological infrastructures should adopt to endow researchers to work in more advanced and innovative ways within the context of open science and education; from the other side, the analysis of scholars' engagement with technologies as expression of the own professional agency.