Abstract
The purpose of this paper was to assess the presence of researchers on two author identifier services (ORCID and ResearcherID) and to compare the results with two academic social networks (Academia.edu and ResearchGate) using the categories of discipline, career advancement, and gender in a medium sized multidisciplinary university in France (University of Caen Normandy). Metrics such as number of publications per researcher, h-indexes, and average number of citations were also assessed. Of the 1,047 researchers studied, 673 (64.3%) had at least one profile on the four sites, and the number of researchers having multiple profiles decreased as more sites were studied. Researchers with only one profile numbered 385 (36.8%), while 204 (19.5%) had two, 68 (6.5%) had three, and only 16 (1.5%) had four. ResearchGate had by far the highest number of researchers present, with 569 (54.3%), whereas presence on the other sites was about 15%. We found that, apart from Academia.edu, researchers in Sciences, Technology, and Medicine (STM) were over-represented. Overall, experienced male researchers were over-represented on the sites studied. Our results show that, because of the numerous profiles lacking publication references (particularly on ORCID) and a low presence of researchers on the four sites studied (except for ResearchGate), assessing the number of publications, h-indexes, or average number of citations per article of individuals or institutions remains challenging. Finally, our data showed that French researchers have not adopted the use of the two author identifier sites (i.e. ORCID and ResearcherID). As long as French researchers remain reticent, these sites will not be able to provide the services for which they were created: addressing the problem of author misidentification, consequently providing exhaustive access to scientific production and bibliometric indicators of individual researchers and their institutions.
Highlights
IntroductionTo assess researchers’ scientific output, several online bibliographic databases have been available (since the late 1990s), but access to most of them is limited by a paywall (both the Web of Science and Scopus are expensive registries, limiting access to a relative minority)
To assess researchers’ scientific output, several online bibliographic databases have been available, but access to most of them is limited by a paywall
The objective of the present study was to assess the presence of researchers on two Author identifiers (AIDs) (ORCID and ResearcherID) and to compare the results with two Academic Social Networks (ASNs) (Academia.edu and ResearchGate), categorized by discipline, career advancement, and gender in a medium sized multidisciplinary university in France (University of Caen Normandy)
Summary
To assess researchers’ scientific output, several online bibliographic databases have been available (since the late 1990s), but access to most of them is limited by a paywall (both the Web of Science and Scopus are expensive registries, limiting access to a relative minority). These tools of the era lacked a fundamental feature: direct communication between those actively doing research and other researchers These sites required intermediate operations, such as obtaining the authors’ email by searching for articles in which they were declared as the corresponding author or searching on the internet on what appeared to be an author’s personal/institutional page, having to send an email to contact them. In 2008, two Academic Social Networks (ASNs), ResearchGate and Academia.edu, appeared almost simultaneously, responding favorably to these expectations They allowed researchers to communicate directly with their peers with an internal and “proprietary” mailing system, and adding their scientific publications onto their profiles (often in full text, at the risk of infringing publishers’ contracts) [1,2]. These interfaces offer several benefits often ignored by conventional tools:
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