King and Covi (1995) studied the use of electronic journals, and their effect on scholarly communications. Rather than just examining the effect of those journals, the researchers also took into consideration variables such as design layout and speed of content updates. What they found was that these journals did play a role in scholarly communication, and each of the different variables had an effect on how well the journal faired (King and Covi, 1995). It is precisely this type of analytical, integrated research that is useful to the field of social informatics, but is generally lacking.
While studies such as that above show clearly the value of social informatics research, done in a systematic, empirical way, the field in and of its self is still too non-integrated and unorganized. In order for the field to be truly beneficial in discussions of information technology implementation, more efforts will need to be made to centralize the research, and organize the concepts. Without proper centralization of concepts, those who would use the information gained from social informatics research, such as managers, information specialists,...
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