Academia = web spiders

Metaphor: responsible academic writing requires an approach very similar to that used by web spiders. We are also expected to use a mental process that relates to ranking algorithms similar to Google's PageRank software, making sure to cite "important works". Sites like CiteSeer, 360, etc., make this easier by showing how frequently a given work gets cited, but they focus on the paper first, not the ranking.

If a paper fails to cite important research, it will often be denigrated by critics as "uninformed" or "insufficiently researched". It therefore behooves academic writers to make a careful survey of the relevant literature.

One potentially useful application would be to build a software tool that uses either direct textual search (word matching) or some sort of semantic search (e.g. "adult learning theories", Digg/Delicious tags, etc.) to figure out which aspects of a particular domain get cited most frequently. Our software tool could then present a list saying "if you're going to write about [topic], other authors will expect you to have read, understood, and cited [collection of resources]." This could save neophytes a lot of time in figuring out what was professionally relevant, and could be seen as the sort of cognitive scaffolding that constructivism advocates.