A Scientometric Analysis of the Literature on the Topic “Academic Social Networks”

Abstract

In the past few decades, scientific communication has become widespread through academic social networks (ASNs). The purpose of this article is to consider ASNs both as a research tool and as an object of study in scientific publications. The scientometric analysis of literature on ASNs was carried out. The literature set consisted of 1,216 records retrieved from the Web of Science (WoS) database. The set included the documents where the ASNs were the scientific research objects or those where the ASNs were only mentioned as a bibliographic data source for systematic reviews or meta-analyses (predominantly in medicine) or as an experimental data repository. It was found that documents on ASNs started to appear in the WoS after 2005. The USA, the University of Wolverhampton (United Kingdom), and M. Thelwall are the country, organization, and author leading in the number of documents on ASNs in the set. The journals published the documents presented by the following subject areas: Computer Science; Computer Science and Librarianship; Mechanical Engineering; Engineering and Technology. Four out of the first ten highly cited documents are devoted to altmetrics in ASNs. The authors used document co-citation analysis via free scientometric analytical software CiteSpace and discovered research fronts. It was found that when the number of publications on ASNs started to rise, scholars began to discuss the community recommendation, professional indexing/folksonomy, and cold-start problem. Later, the altmetrics used in the ASNs became the main subject in the researches of ASNs. The last statement is confirmed by co-word analysis via CiteSpace. It is shown that the most frequent keywords of the studied document set are altmetrics, impact, and citation.