Scholarly social media profiles and libraries

Abstract

This article aims to point out emerging roles and responsibilities for academic librarians with the potential of better integrating the library in the research process. In order to find out how to enhance the online reputation and discoverability of individual faculty members as well as their affiliated institutions, the authors worked side-by-side with researchers in the United States and Europe to explore, create, revise, and disambiguate scholarly profiles in various software applications. In an attempt to understand and organize scholarly social media, including new, alternative metrics, the authors reviewed and classified the major academic profile platforms, highlighting the overlapping elements, benefits, and drawbacks inherent in each. The consensus is that it would be time-consuming to keep one's profile current and accurate on all of these platforms, given the plethora of underlying problems, also discussed in detail in the article. However, it came as a startling discovery that reluctance to engage with scholarly social Judit Ward et al. Liber Quarterly Volume 24 Issue 4 2015175 media may cause a misrepresentation of a researcher's academic achievements and may come with unforeseen consequences. The authors claim that current skills and competencies can secure an essential role for academic librarians in the research workflow by means of monitoring and navigating researcher profiles in scholarly social media in order to best represent the scholarship of their host institutions.

ResearchGate articles: Age, discipline, audience size, and impact

“…Alternatively, or in addition, the author may self‐archive a preprint in a subject or institutional repository (Swan & Brown, ), on their own website (Kousha & Thelwall, ), or in an academic social website such as ResearchGate or http://Academia.edu. Nevertheless, whichever strategies are chosen, there is a trade‐off between the time needed to upload information and the benefits of the extra publicity (Ward, Bejarano, & Dudás, ). In this context, it is important to assess the advantages of each site to allow rational choices about which, if any, to use.…”

“…In addition to the above knowledge gaps, no investigation has assessed the disciplinary or age coverage of ResearchGate to characterize typical articles uploaded and to assess whether there are different levels of interest in them. This is an important omission because (a) this information can be used to guide recommendations for the types of authors and articles that would most benefit from using the site (see also Ward et al, ); (b) levels of uptake can give contexts to institutional analyses of associated ethical and intellectual property issues (Arènes, ) for proposals to use ResearchGate as a data source for alternative metrics (Campos Freire & Valencia, ; Scarlat, Mavrogenis, Pećina, & Niculescu, ); and (c) ResearchGate can be an important source of articles for research (e.g., Kamath, Setlur, & Yerlagudda, ; Łaczmański et al, ; McKellar & Currie, ; Velik, ). In response, this study analyzes a large sample of publications recently uploaded to ResearchGate to assess their age and discipline and the relationship between views on the site and other academic indicators.…”

Investigating practices for building an ethical and sustainable scholarly identity with online platforms and social networking sites

“…Researchers have connected achievements, such as tenure and promotion, to altmetrics gathered from forums like ResearchGate (Megwalu, ) and Academia.edu (Duffy & Pooley, ; Ortega, ; Thelwall & Kousha, 2014). Additionally, some scholarship has linked academic library services to SI‐related assistance for researchers working within university settings (Ward et al, ; Reed et al, ).…”

“…Research within Library and Information Science (LIS) also has linked academic library services to SI‐related assistance (Ward et al, ; Reed et al, ). Because many scholars still may lack strategies for crafting or maintaining online SIs, libraries have begun to provide services to support, orient, and educate users (Reed et al, ).…”

Making Sense of Researcher Services

“…Given the aforementioned inconsistent and often unclear terminology in research literature, we utilized the following terms: "researcher profile systems," "researcher profile sites," "academic profile platforms," "academic network sites," "academic profiling sites," "citation management," "academic networks," "researcher networks," "researcher identification," "author identification." Although keyword searches yielded few articles specific to this topic of researchers services, we identified several tangential articles (Ebadi & Schiffauerova, 2015); (Enserink, 2009); (Nentwich & König, 2014); (Ward, Bejarano, & Dudás, 2015). A number of articles investigated the purpose, functionality, and/or potential of a single service (Butler, 2012); (Schubert & Holloway, 2014); (Zaugg, West, Tateishi, & Randall, 2011) or provided a comparative look at two services (Kelly & Delasalle, 2012); (Van Noorden, 2014).…”