Can a personal website be useful as an information source to assess individual scientists? The case of European highly cited researchers

Abstract

The Web is not only the main scholarly communication tool but also an important source of additional information about the individual researchers, their scientific and academic activities and their formally and informally published results. The aim of this study is to investigate whether successful scientists use their personal websites to disseminate their work and career details and to know which specific contents are provided on those sites, in order to check if they could be used in research evaluation. The presence of the highly cited researchers working at European institutions were analysed, a group clearly biased towards senior male researchers working in large countries (United Kingdom and Germany). Results show that about two thirds of them have a personal website, specially the scientists from Denmark, Israel and the United Kingdom. The most frequent disciplines in those websites are economics, mathematics, computer sciences and space sciences, which probably reflect the success of Open Access subject repositories like RepEc, Arxiv or CiteSeerX. Other pieces of information analysed from the websites include personal and contact data, past experience and description of expertise, current activities and lists of the author's scientific papers. Indicators derived from most of these items can be used for developing a portfolio with evaluation purposes, but the overall availability of them in the population analysed is not representative enough by now for achieving that objective. Reasons for that insufficient coverage and suggestions for improvement are discussed.

Researchers’ attitudes towards the use of social networking sites

“…Today, academic standing may be linked to online standing: a researcher's online presence is an important channel for dissemination of expertise and achievements (Genoni et al, 2005;Mas-Bleda and Aguillo, 2013). Many researchers feel it is important to have a strong online presence in addition to having high quality publications in order to make a scientific impact.…”

Visibility and Citation Impact

“…Availability of the articles on author personal website (Antelman, 2004;Más-Bleda & Aguillo, 2013) Deposit the paper in the institutional repository (Tate, 2010;Ngah, 2010;Koulouris et al, 2013) …”

“…The World Wide Web has become an outstanding tool for the collection and dissemination of scholarly Information (Más-Bleda & Aguillo, 2013). The majority of freely available articles will be found on author personal website rather than in a repository or in an open-access journal (Antelman, 2004).…”

Blowing Your Own Trumpet: How to Increase the Online Visibility of Your Publication?

“…Self-archiving: One of the ways of self-archiving accepted article is through creation of personal websites that makes the article open access, thereby increasing its impact and citations. Personal websites are created by individual researchers where they post information regarding their article along with their personal details, a Curriculum Vitae, list of publications, research interest, experience and expertise, and research projects and conference presentations [10]; thereby, making it a channel that projects their work. It has been found that open access repositories have a lower proportion of citations [11] as compared to personal websites, but the effectiveness of such self-publishing is questionable [12].…”