Does Tagging Indicate Knowledge Diffusion? An Exploratory Case Study

The high potential of knowledge to create economies of scale attracted the interest towards understanding the dynamics of its diffusion. The new developments in the collaborative and participatory role of web emerges new knowledge structures driving the need towards Web based indicators for studying the diffusion of knowledge on Web. We present the results of an exploratory case-study investigating the tagging and citing practices for the WWW `06 conference papers. We observed two important patterns: (1) Papers which got heavily tagged in all three applications Delicious, Citeulike and Bibsonomy (average total tags > 6) generally achieved a high number of citations. We also observed that most of the tags were from 2006 and most of the citations were from 2007. This indicated that tags may hold the potential of foretelling the future volume of regenerative diffusion of research. (2) Terms appearing in tag-clouds of highly tagged papers in 2006 reappear frequently in the titles of respective citing papers in 2007. This shows that tag clouds may have the potential of forecasting the context of diffusion as well. It furthermore indicates that the users tag the papers with multiple tags according to their specific contexts of use as well as content of that knowledge artifact. Based on these patterns we propose that tags may be used as a supplementary indicator to model the diffusion of knowledge on Web.