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Social capital positively affects employees' sense of well-being.Increasing well-being positively affects explicit and tacit knowledge-sharing.Tacit knowledge-sharing positively influences employees' explicit knowledge-sharing.Social networks and well-being can facilitate employees' altruistic behaviour. In view of the importance of employees' knowledge sharing, this research, which draws on social capital theory and employees' sense of well-being, develops a comprehensive theoretical model which aims to explore deeply the mediating impact of employees' sense of well-being on social capital and the contribution of knowledge in the complex context of a virtual organisation. The quantitative approach was conducted at a virtual organisation of Taiwanese NGOs. 135 valid questionnaires were distributed and retrieved personally; subsequently these were analysed using partial least squares (PLS). The findings revealed that employees' sense of well-being improved considerably when they demonstrated stronger levels of social capital tendency. Meanwhile, employees increasingly contributed, not only their tacit but also their explicit knowledge, when they experienced a greater sense of well-being. Even more surprisingly, the results showed that employees' sense of well-being played a positively and pivotally mediating role in the relationship between social capital and employees' tacit and explicit knowledge-sharing behaviour in the virtual organisation. These suggest that managers within virtual organisations urgently need strategies to create an ambiance in which employees can feel a sense of well-being in order to enhance their willingness to share both their explicit and tacit knowledge.

This paper deals with information needs, seeking, searching, and uses within scholarly communities by introducing theory from the field of science and technology studies. In particular it contributes to the domain-analytic approach in information science by showing that Whitley's theory of 'mutual dependence' and 'task uncertainty' can be used as an explanatory framework in understanding similarity and difference in information practices across intellectual fields. Based on qualitative case studies of three specialist scholarly communities across the physical sciences, applied sciences, social sciences and arts and humanities, this paper extends Whitley's theory into the realm of information communication technologies. The paper adopts a holistic approach to information practices by recognising the interrelationship between the traditions of informal and formal scientific communication and how it shapes digital outcomes across intellectual fields. The findings show that communities inhabiting fields with a high degree of 'mutual dependence' coupled with a low degree of 'task uncertainty' are adept at coordinating and controlling channels of communication and will readily co-produce field-based digital information resources, whereas communities that inhabit fields characterised by the opposite cultural configuration, a low degree of 'mutual dependence' coupled with a high degree of 'task uncertainty', are less successful in commanding control over channels of communication and are less concerned with co-producing field-based digital resources and integrating them into their epistemic and social structures. These findings have implications for the culturally sensitive development and provision of academic digital resources such as digital libraries and web-based subject portals.

In order to help determine whether the winner-take-all hypothesis applied to patterns of access to information we conducted a series of semi-structured interviews in a sub-sample of the original six global domains. These were Terrorism, HIV/AIDS, Climate Change, and Internet and Society. In total twenty UK-based active researchers were interviewed; five from each of the four domains. Interviewees were asked about their research background, key institutions, groups and people in their research networks, and the variety of online resources they used. Questions also focused on their online search strategies, such as the tools they used for finding information, the keywords they used and what kind of entities they tended to search for e.g. people, groups or institutions. The interviews also covered direct validation of specific aspects of the webmetric data. For this we asked respondents to comment on the Google representation of key institutions, organizations and people in their domain and the extent to which it overlapped with their own mental model of the domain e.g. their individual perception of what constitutes the core set of resources and sources (it is important to note that this is different to a particular mental model they may have at any one time in relation to a situational information need). The Google representation was derived during the webmetric data gathering and analysis by retrieving the top-thirty URLs in each domain from Google.com. As with quantitative webmetric results, our qualitative interview findings show that there is no uniform 'Winner-takes-all' effect in the use of online resources. Instead, there are different kinds of gatekeepers for the four topics we examined and for the types of information that are sought. It is therefore important not just to identify a concentration or democratization effect, but rather to refine under what circumstances the search for expertise will be dominated by certain results and exhibit biases, and when, instead, researchers will be led to the resources they seek and to a variety of results. Particular characteristics of a domain's information environment will determine whether Google and other Internet search engines function as a facilitator or as an influential gatekeeper.