The net as a knowledge machine: How the Internet became embedded in research

Abstract

In this article, we examine the growth of the Internet as a research topic across the disciplines and the embedding of the Internet into the very fabric of research. While this is a trend that ‘everyone knows’, prior to this study, no work had quantified the extent to which this common sense knowledge was true or how the embedding actually took place. Using scientometric data extracted from Scopus, we explore how the Internet has become a powerful knowledge machine which forms part of the scientific infrastructure across not just technology fields, but also right across the social sciences, sciences and humanities.