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In this paper we investigate the different ways the Internet and the WWW are used in different research fields. The question we address is: is the variation in use related to the type of research field – especially with the difference between basic research and more application oriented research? We compare fields from sciences, life sciences, social sciences and humanities, and among these some are more application oriented than others. The results indicate that the observed differences between the disciplinary websites are not systematically related to application orientation. We discuss other differences between research fields that may explain the use and nature of the websites.

Science mapping using document networks is based on the assumption that scientific papers are indivisible units with unique links to neighbour documents. Research on proximity in co-citation analysis and the study of lexical properties of sections and citation contexts indicate that this assumption is questionable. Moreover, the meaning of words and co-words depends on the context in which they appear. This study proposes the use of a neural network architecture for word and paragraph embeddings (Doc2Vec) for the measurement of similarity among those smaller units of analysis. It is shown that paragraphs in the ‘Introduction’ and the ‘Discussion’ section are more similar to the abstract, that the similarity among paragraphs is related to -but not linearly- the distance between the paragraphs. The ‘Methodology’ section is least similar to the other sections. Abstracts of citing-cited documents are more similar than random pairs and the context in which a reference appears is most similar to the abstract of the cited document. This novel approach with higher granularity can be used for bibliometric aided retrieval and to assist in measuring interdisciplinarity through the application of network-based centrality measures. ispartof: FEB Research Report MSI_1901 status: published