  e-Research is a rapidly growing research area, both in terms of publications
and in terms of funding. In this article we argue that it is necessary to
reconceptualize the ways in which we seek to measure and understand e-Research
by developing a sociology of knowledge based on our understanding of how
science has been transformed historically and shifted into online forms. Next,
we report data which allows the examination of e-Research through a variety of
traces in order to begin to understand how the knowledge in the realm of
e-Research has been and is being constructed. These data indicate that
e-Research has had a variable impact in different fields of research. We argue
that only an overall account of the scale and scope of e-Research within and
between different fields makes it possible to identify the organizational
coherence and diffuseness of e-Research in terms of its socio-technical
networks, and thus to identify the contributions of e-Research to various
research fronts in the online production of knowledge.
