Isabella Peters

Professor Isabella Peters serves as Professor of Web Science at ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics, affiliated with Kiel University since 2013. Her research bridges information science, scholarly communication, and digital scholarship within the European research landscape.

Her educational background includes a PhD in Information Science from Heinrich-Heine-University Düsseldorf (2009), preceded by studies in German Linguistics, German Literature, and Information Science. She received the Verein zur Förderung der Informationswissenschaft e.V. award for her doctoral work on folksonomies.

Peters' research focuses on Social Media and Open Science, particularly examining user-generated content, altmetrics, scholarly communication practices, and the transformation of academic publishing. Her work analyzes how digital platforms reshape research dissemination, evaluation, and public engagement with science. Through extensive bibliometric studies, she investigates preprint adoption, open access models, and the interplay between traditional and alternative research metrics.

Her publication record demonstrates significant contributions to understanding the impact of digital transformation on scholarly communication, with particular emphasis on pandemic-era research practices, global publishing disparities, and the evolving role of social media in academic discourse. Recent work explores human-centered AI applications and interdisciplinary knowledge integration.

• Award of the Verein zur Förderung der Informationswissenschaft e.V. for PhD thesis (2010)
• Member of Scientific Advisory Board DZHW (since 2021)
• Active in Association for Information Science and Technology (ASIS&T) European Chapter
• Former Head of Metrics Working Group in LIBER (until 2019)
• Former Member of European Commission High Level Expert Group on Altmetrics (until 2018)

Peters actively reviews for major journals including PLoS One, Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology, and Scientometrics. She co-edited the 2023 volume The Science-Media Interface and contributes to foundational texts in information science. Her work with the Web Science research group at ZBW positions her at the forefront of examining how digital technologies transform knowledge production and dissemination.