Identifying influential scholars in academic social media platforms

Abstract

The emergence of social media has created new ways to publish scientific work, foster collaboration, and build professional connections in the research community. The rich data collected in social media platforms has provided new opportunities for assessing scholars' impact other than the traditional citation-based approach. In this paper, we investigate the measures of scholars' influence in academic social media platforms, taking both academic and social impact into account. A real-life dataset collected from Mendeley is used to apply different influence metrics. We first assess the academic influence of scholars based on the scientific impact of their publications using three different measures. Then we investigate their social influence using network centrality metrics. The experiments show that top influencers with high academic impact tend to be senior scholars with many coauthors. Furthermore, academic influence and social influence measures do not strongly correlate with each other, and thus scholars with high academic impact are not necessarily influential from a social point of view. Adding the social dimension could enhance the traditional impact metrics that only take academic influence into account.