A group of faculty and researchers from Florida State University’s College of Communication & Information (CCI) collaborated on an analysis of discussion board data from Patients Like Me and their findings were recently published in the Journal of the Association for Information Science & Technology.

School of Information faculty members Michelle Kazmer, Mia Lustria and Gary Burnett, School of Communication assistant professor Juliann Cortese and School of Information researcher Jinxuan Ma from CCI joined with Jihyun Kim, a faculty member in the Department of Library and Information Science at Chonnam National University in Korea, and Jeana Frost, a faculty member from the Department of Communication Sciences in the Vrije Universiteit, Netherlands, on the article entitled, “Distributed knowledge in an online patient support community: Authority and discovery.”

The focus of the study was to examine distributed knowledge-building with the Patients Like Me (PLM) online support community for patients with Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS) — a rare, progressively debilitating and currently incurable disease.

From the abstract, “This qualitative analysis of 1000 posts from the PLM ALS online discussion examines the social support within the PLM ALS online community, and explores ways community members share and build knowledge.”

The Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology (JASIST) is a leading international forum for peer-reviewed research in information science.

Full citation: Michelle M. Kazmer, Mia Liza A. Lustria, Juliann Cortese, Gary Burnett, Jihyun Kim, Jinxuan Ma and Jeana Frost (2014). Distributed knowledge in an online patient support community: Authority and discovery (pages 1319–1334). Journal of the Association for Information Science & Technology, Volume 65, Number 7. DOI: 10.1002/asi.23064.