Disciplinary differences in the use of academic social networking sites
| Published date | 10 August 2015 |
| Date | 10 August 2015 |
| Pages | 520-536 |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/OIR-03-2015-0093 |
| Author | José Luis Ortega |
| Subject Matter | Library & information science,Information behaviour & retrieval |
Disciplinary differences in the
use of academic social
networking sites
José Luis Ortega
Cybermetrics Laboratory, Spanish National Research Council (CSIC),
Madrid, Spain
Abstract
Purpose –The purpose of this paper is to detect and describe disciplinary differences in the users and
use of several social networking sites by scientists.
Design/methodology/approach –Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (CSIC) (Spanish
National Research Council) researchers registered in the most currently relevant academic social
network sites (Google Scholar Citations, Academia.edu, ResearchGate (RG) and Mendeley) were
analysed. In total, 6,132 profiles were classified according the eight research areas of the CSIC.
Findings –Results showthat Academia.edu is massively populatedby humanists and socialscientists,
while RG is popularamong biologists. Disciplinary differences are observedacross every platform. Thus,
scientists from the humanities and social sciences and natural resources show a significant activity
contacting other members. On the contrary, biologists are more passive using socialtools.
Originality/value –This is the firststudy that analyses the disciplinary performanceof a same sample
of researchers ona varied number of academic social sites, comparing theirnumbers across web sites.
Keywords Webometrics, Altmetrics, Academic social sites, Spanish National Research Council
Paper type Research paper
Introduction
Social networking sites have become increasingly important in the scholarly community.
Many researchers have built personal profiles that allow them to interact with colleagues
and share interests, questions and papers (Nentwich and König, 2014). These public
profiles also provide the opportunity to boost one’s achievements and competewith other
researchers for social recognition and future research rewards (Bik and Goldstein,
2013). This transparent attitude also favours the possibility of auditing the research
performance of these scientists and making comparisons across disciplines, institutions
and countries. Hence scientometricians are facing a new challenge: to measure and
evaluate the online activity of these users in the context of research evaluation (Priem and
Hemminger, 2010). For example the numbers of views, downloads and followers are
statistics produced by these sites that provide a new perspective on the social nature of
science. These metrics might be considered in research evaluation as signs of scholarly
impact and popular attention. However, before incorporating these metrics in assessment
exercises, it is necessary to understand their meaning, limitations and connections with
traditional impact measures (Bollen et al., 2009; Priem et al., 2012; Thelwall et al., 2013).
Moreover, it is necessary to study the characteristics of the users of these platforms and
how their functionalities are used to understand the nature and origin of these alternative
indicators. These tools need to be analysed in order to validate whether they are
representative of the entire scholarlycommunity or if only specific types of disciplines are
using them.This study aims to detectdisciplinary differences in thepopulation and use of
some of the most popular academic social network sites: Google Scholar Citations (GSC),
Academia.edu, ResearchGate (RG) and Mendeley.
Online Information Review
Vol. 39 No. 4, 2015
pp. 520-536
©Emerald Group Publishing Limited
1468-4527
DOI 10.1108/OIR-03-2015-0093
Received 27 March 2015
First revision approved
27 April 2015
The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available on Emerald Insight at:
www.emeraldinsight.com/1468-4527.htm
520
OIR
39,4
Related research
The fast growth of academic social networking sites leads to a need to know how
these sites are populated. Several studies have shown the low uptake of these
technologies by the research community. Bik and Goldstein (2013) mentioned that in
2011 only 2.5 per cent of UK and US academics had created a Twitter account.
Haustein et al. (2014), tracking the presence of 57 scientometricians on the web, found
that 23 per cent were present on GSC and 16 per cent had a Twitter account, whereas
Mas-Bleda et al. (2014) followed 1,517 highly cited authors in several social sites,
uncovering a low adoption rate and the limited overlap of academic social sites.
Ortega (2015) specified that from a sample of Consejo Superior de Investigaciones
Científicas’(CSIC’s) researchers 72 per cent had a profile on only one academic social
site. Besides this low use of social media platforms by scientists, several studies
demonstrated that these sites have a skewed population: for example on Academia.
edu, humanities represented the majority of the population (Thelwall and Kousha,
2014) and the most active user group (Almousa, 2011), whereas computer and
information scientists were dominant on GSC (Ortega and Aguillo, 2012). To a lesser
extent RG showed a slight predominance of biology researchers (ResearchGate,
2014).
Along these lines, many papers have described the theoretical advantages of
social networks for research performance (Bullinger et al., 2010; Veletsianos and
Kimmons, 2012; Kelly, 2013). Others have employed surveys to assess the opinions of
researchers about the use of these tools (Jahan and Ahmed, 2012). The most relevant
and recent was a questionnaire in the journal Nature (Van Noorden, 2014). This
study showed that researchers use different social sites for different purposes.
For example RG and Academia.edu were mainly utilised for contacting new
collaborators, while Mendeley was used for finding new papers. Haustein et al. (2014)
also report that GSC was used to check citations, while Academia.edu and RG were
used to upload papers.
In this context where each social site is used for different purposes, several studies
have analysed whether differences occur across research disciplines as well. It is
interesting that most of these studies involved Mendeley. Oh and Jeng (2011) studied
user groups on Mendeley and found that core humanities disciplines (arts and
literature, law) had the smallest proportion of users forming groups, while computer
science was the discipline with most users in discussion groups. Jiang et al. (2013) found
that humanities scholars had more followers as a proportion of the number of users.
In contrast Jeng et al. (in press) found no statistical differences by discipline in the
motivations to use Mendeley. Mohammadi and Thelwall (2014) observed that
correlations between readership counts and citations for the social sciences were higher
than for the humanities.
However, studies analysing disciplinary differences on scholarly social networking
sites other than Mendeley are rare. Kadriu (2013) extracted several collaborative
networks in RG by groups of interests. Thelwall and Kousha (2014) analysed metrics
from Academia.edu in four disciplines, but they did not find significant differences.
Jordan (2014), using a questionnaire, found that humanities and social scientists follow
people who they do not know personally.
The present study analyses the use of different academic social networking
sites by a large number of researchers (6,000+) to explore disciplinary differences
within and across the most popular platforms: GSC, Academia.edu, RG and
Mendeley.
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