Research On Communication Modes In The Virtual Academic Community

With the further development of the internet, virtual academic communities are becoming a very important informal communication space and channel for researchers. In order to capture major characteristics of academic communication in virtual academic communities, this dissertation conducts both theoretical research and empirical study focusing on communication subjects (users), objects (topics) and communication modes.First, by conducting theoretical research on virtual academic communities, this paper grasps the latest progress made in the aspects of virtual academic community concept, user categorie, user behavior, communication content and modes, and then summarizes the shortages of existing research.Second, this dissertation chooses medical virtual academic community, Dingxiangyuan forum, as an example for empirical research. (1) By analyzing user identity characteristics, post-reply behaviors, as well as their relevance, this paper discusses the user character in virtual academic communities and the post-reply behaviors between different academic identities, then categorizes different users based on their activeness and impact; (2) By studying the distribution of posts, communication topics and content, this paper categorizes the posts into three types and analyzes the feature of heated-discussions; (3) By analyzing user post-reply network relations, as well as co-reply network, which facilitates user implicit connections, this paper studies network structural characters, core users and different small groups from the views of both whole network and selected backbone network. Besides, by analyzing selected core users network that involves both semantic and link information, this paper identifies its advantage when studying core groups who have similar posted contents. Furthermore, user communication character also appears on forum plate character, and by studying the post-reply quantities of different forum plates, as well as the forum plates’ co-appearance network, this paper identifies the difference between forum plates and the feature of cross-plate communication.Third, Based on the theoretical research and empirical study, this dissertation discusses the communication modes of virtual academic communities, which are one-to-one, single-center, multi-center, broadcast and cross-domain commuciation modes, and summarize the charateristics and influences of user communication, then proposes relevant suggestions for the website construction of virtual academic communities.Through the comprehensive studies of communication subjects, objects and communication modes, we can expect a better guidance of knowledge exchanges in virtual environment, an enhanced content organization method for virtual academic communities, a targeted information services, and at last, a better online academic communication environment.