The Legitimation of Non-Traditional Scientific Communication in European Academia

This study examines the formal integration of Ensaios e Notas—a non-peer-reviewed, Portuguese-language curated website focused on humanities and social sciences—into European master's and doctoral outputs. Using Google Scholar, we identified 144 citing documents, filtered to 13 qualifying European graduate works (10 master's dissertations, 2 PhD theses, 1 Erasmus+ project report/proceeding) from Portugal, Spain, and related institutions. Content analysis of citations (inter-coder reliability κ = 0.81, n = 26 coders) revealed that 85% (11/13) function as conceptual definitions or short theoretical anchors (e.g., Peircean semiotics, Erikson's psychosocial stages, anthropological definitions of culture), with zero instances of engagement with opinionated or speculative content. A small post-hoc author survey (7/13 responses) indicated that users valued the blog for its concise, accessible syntheses compared to standard handbooks. We introduce and operationalize "reverse altmetrics" as the tracking of citations from non-traditional digital sources into formal academic literature, demonstrating how curated blogs can attain "liquid authority" in high-stakes evaluation contexts. We recommend incorporating disclosed reverse-altmetric indicators into contextual bibliometric assessments, while acknowledging language and geographic biases.