The ''mad cow disease'', Usenet newsgroups and bibliometric laws

In this paper the reactions of Usenet News users' to ''mad cow disease'' is examined. Thousands of newsgroups on an extremely wide variety of subjects exist, and anyone, having access to the Internet, can express his/her thoughts freely on this medium. We collected information on the news items relevant to ''mad cow disease'' for a period of one hundred days starting very close to the eruption of the crisis. The analysis of the collected information reveals some similarities between the bibliometric characteristics of news items on an electronic medium and the physically printed scientific literature. As far as we know, this is one of the first attempts to systematically apply bibliometric methods to the Internet.