Internet research, or more exactly internet scholarship is the topic of my PhD. So I rather assume it exists, at least for the 200 pages or so of work I have written to describe it. It is controversial about whether it is a field of study. David Silver has usefully called it a meta-field - Silver, D. 2004. Internet/cyberculture/digital culture/new media/fill-in-the-blank studies. New Media & Society, 6(1), 55-64. The special issue of TIS (below) should cover or at least list a few of the major perspectives on it - Baym, N. (Guest editor) 2005. Special issue of The Information Society: ICT research and disciplinary boundaries: Is Internet research a virtual field, a proto-discipline, or something else? The Information Society, 21(4). I examine it from a perspective of hybridized disciplinarity plus operational challenges and refer to internet studies as an emergent field of study with roots in many other fields. Web studies has not become the acceptable term at least so far (Silver 2004) but see - Gauntlett, D. (Ed.). 2000. Web.studies. London: Arnold. I believe there is an updated version of this book. For "HOW TO BECOME" an internet researcher, I would recommend the following, at least for academic work: - Thelwall, M. 2004. Link Analysis: An Information Science Approach. San Diego: Academic Press. At least it explains what link analysis is and what it is used for. Other types of internet research have been usefully explained in several books: - Batinic, B., Reips, U.-D., & Bosnjak, M. (Eds.). 2002. Online Social Sciences. Seattle: Hogrefe & Huber. - Jones, S. (Ed.). 1999. Doing internet research: Critical issues and methods for examining the Net. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. - Mann, C., & Stewart, F. 2000. Internet communication and qualitative research: A handbook for researching online. London: Sage. - Hine, C. (Ed.). 2005. Virtual methods: Issues in social research on the Internet. Oxford: Berg Publishers. Cheers, Denise Denise N. Rall, PhD thesis submitted, School of Environ. Science, Southern Cross University, Lismore NSW 2480 AUSTRALIA Tuesdays: Room T2.17, +61 (0)2 6620 3577 or Mobile 0438 23 33 44 http://www.scu.edu.au/schools/rsm/staff/pages/drall/ Virtual member, Cybermetrics Group, University of Wolverhampton, UK http://cybermetrics.wlv.ac.uk/index.html ____________________________________________________________________________________ Low, Low, Low Rates! Check out Yahoo! Messenger's cheap PC-to-Phone call rates (http://voice.yahoo.com)