Digital Presence of Norwegian Scholars on Academic Network Sites—Where and Who Are They?

Abstract

The use of academic profiling sites is becoming more common, and emerging technologies boost researchers’ visibility and exchange of ideas. In our study we compared profiles at five different profiling sites. These five sites are ResearchGate, Academia.edu, Google Scholar Citations, ResearcherID and ORCID. The data set is enriched by demographic information including age, gender, position and affiliation, which are provided by the national CRIS-system in Norway. We find that approximately 37% of researchers at the University of Bergen have at least one profile, the prevalence being highest (> 40%) for members at the Faculty of Psychology and the Faculty of Social Sciences. Across all disciplines, ResearchGate is the most widely used platform. However, within Faculty of Humanities, Academia.edu is the preferred one. Researchers are reluctant to maintain multiple profiles, and there is little overlap between different services. Age turns out to be a poor indicator for presence in the investigated profiling sites, women are underrepresented and professors together with PhD students are the most likely profile holders. We next investigated the correlation between bibliometric measures, such as publications and citations, and user activities, such as downloads and followers. We find different bibliometric indicators to correlate strongly within individual platforms and across platforms. There is however less agreement between the traditional bibliometric and social activity indicators.

Institutional Repositories and Academic Social Networks: Competition or Complement? A Study of Open Access Policy Compliance vs. ResearchGate Participation

“…Our study would help us understand whether ResearchGate was competing with our IR for faculty-authored content. It would also provide insights that could lead to improvements in our implementation of the OA Policy and greater success in recruiting faculty content.We chose to compare the faculty's OA Policy compliance with their participation in ResearchGate specifically-rather than Academia.edu or other sites-primarily because ResearchGate has been shown to be the most popular academic social network among scholars Campos-Freire & Rúas-Araújo, 2016;Elsayed, 2015;Jamali, Nicholas, & Herman, 2016;Matthews, 2016; MeisharTal & Pieterse, 2017;Mikki, Zygmuntowska, Gjesdal, & Al Ruwehy, 2015;Ortega, 2015;Singh, 2016;Tran & Lyon, 2017;Van Noorden, 2014). …”

“…Nature found that just under half of the more than 3,500 scientists and engineers they surveyed visit ResearchGate regularly (Van Noorden, 2014), while a recent survey of over 20,000 respondents by researchers at Utrecht University Library found that 61% who have published at least one paper use ResearchGate Matthews, 2016). Other measures of the proportion of researchers using ResearchGate range from 15% to 65% depending on the population studied (Campos & Valencia, 2015;Haustein et al, 2014;Laakso et al, 2017;Lupton, 2014;Madhusudhan, 2012;Mahajan, Singh, & Kumar, 2013;Meishar-Tal & Pieterse, 2017;Míguez-González, Puentes-Rivera, & Dafonte-Gómez, 2017;Mikki et al, 2015;Ortega, 2015;Singh, 2016;Tran & Lyon, 2017).A number of studies have reported that ResearchGate is relatively more popular among researchers in the sciences when compared with the academic social network Academia. edu, which is preferred by researchers in the social sciences and especially the humanities Campos-Freire & Rúas-Araújo, 2016;Elsayed, 2015;Jamali et al, 2016;Matthews, 2016;Mikki et al, 2015;Nández & Borrego, 2013;Ortega, 2015;Thelwall & Kousha, 2015;Thelwall & Kousha, 2017;Van Noorden, 2014 Míguez-González et al, 2017;Mikki et al, 2015;Ortega, 2015;Singh, 2016;Tran & Lyon, 2017;Van Noorden, 2014).…”

“…edu, which is preferred by researchers in the social sciences and especially the humanities Campos-Freire & Rúas-Araújo, 2016;Elsayed, 2015;Jamali et al, 2016;Matthews, 2016;Mikki et al, 2015;Nández & Borrego, 2013;Ortega, 2015;Thelwall & Kousha, 2015;Thelwall & Kousha, 2017;Van Noorden, 2014 Míguez-González et al, 2017;Mikki et al, 2015;Ortega, 2015;Singh, 2016;Tran & Lyon, 2017;Van Noorden, 2014). Use of ResearchGate is notably higher than that of Academia.edu among senior researchers Matthews, 2016;Mikki et al, 2015).The ability to upload and share the full-text of publications is a feature valued by users of ResearchGate and similar academic social networks (Campos-Freire & Rúas-Araújo, 2016;Corvello, Genovese, & Verteramo, 2014;Elsayed, 2015;Laakso et al, 2017;Marra, 2015;Matthews, 2016;Nicholas et al, 2015;Tenopir et al, 2016;Van Noorden, 2014;Wu, Stvilia, & Lee, 2016). This contributes to ResearchGate being a significant source of freely available scholarly content.…”

Réseaux sociaux académiques et diffusion de la production scientifique des chercheurs en biologie/médecine

“…REPÈRES médecine/sciences 2017 ; 33 : 647-52 médecine/sciences de ces deux plateformes [4][5][6][7]. Un tel développement s'explique en partie par leur utilisation des codes du web 2.0 3 [8,9] (➜), à commencer par la facilité d'utilisation et la gratuité, mais surtout par leur insertion dans l'écosystème académique.…”

Use and assessment of general-interest social networks and academic databases in Galician universities

“…Most researchers still do not manage their academic profiles in an efficient, careful, updated and complete way, according to a study by the University of Bergen (Mikki, Zygmuntowska, Gjesdal et al, 2015). Studies on collective intelligence and social search have identified the behaviour patterns and the taxonomies centred in the user (McDonnell and Siri, 2011).…”