Academic Social Networks Research Articles

Research collaboration model in academic social networks

ABSTRACT This paper proposes a hybrid collaboration recommendation method that accounts for research similarities and the previous research cooperation network. Research cooperation is measured by combining the collaboration time and the number of co-authors who already collaborated with at least one scientist. Research similarity is based on authors’ previous publications and academic events they attended. A weighted directed graph is built to discover new collaborators by using direct and indirect connections between scientists. Moreover, a consensus-based system is built to integrate bibliography data from different sources. The experimental results show that our method improves the recommendation performances over other methods.

IRPPS e-Publishing service: performance assessment and development of future services

Over the last decade academic and research libraries have had a fundamental role in supporting Open access practices, in the construction of Institutional repositories, in digitization programs and in the development of additional services for their community. More recently they are moving toward Open science and are identified as one of the main stakeholders in promoting visibility and access of locally-produced scholarship by developing innovative digital publishing service, as well as providing support and guidance on tools and practices in the new open science environment.In line with these open access practices, the IRPPS e-Publishing service was developed with the aim of managing and disseminating its in-house publications. Launched in 2012, the service currently hosts two series – IRPPS Monographs and IRPPS Working Papers – and uses an open source software (Open Journal Systems, OJS) that supports every stage of the publishing process, including the peer-review process. At the beginning of the project a range of services was also developed to assure a uniform and transparent editorial process such as guidelines for submission, editorial and publishing policies aligned with international developments etc. In addition, for each published product a persistent identifier and long-term preservation in the CNR institutional repository, as well as indexing procedures in disciplinary archives and/or academic publishing search engines (i.e. Google Scholar, RePEc, etc.), have been provided contributing to increased availability and visibility of IRPPS scientific outputs.Six years after its launch, it is necessary to make an assessment on strengths and weaknesses of the project. For these reasons the paper intends to describe the analysis carried out to evaluate its impact on both the production of the Institute’s scientific outputs and on their visibility. In particular our object is to investigate the relation between the editorial quality of products connected with already implemented publishing tools (editorial scientific board, international bibliographic codes, copyright/ creative commons etc.) and their impact on managerial, organizational and diffusion activities. For these reasons we analysed the characteristics of published contents in terms of number and type of material, publishing practices and usage statistics.This analysis allows us to gain insight of trends in the increase of published products as well as changes in the types of publications, while publishing practices provide indications on co-authorship and internal and external networking, among other things. This allows us to verify to what extent the editorial improvements introduced by the development of an e-Publishing service have attracted authors to choose this platform to disseminate their work in an open access mode. This is crucial in our case given that the production in Humanities and Social sciences is more locally oriented and mainly monograph-based.Moreover, usage statistics on the basis of data provided by Google analytics and OJS statistical reports, helps analysing readership as well as type of use of IRPPS research products also comparing these results with access of papers previously available on the institutional web page.This analysis provides the basis for the implementation of innovative publishing tools such as altmetrics, and other quantitative and qualitative impact metrics, such as those linked to academic social networks. Moreover, indications from this review can drive the development of an editorial plan related to the digitization of previously published works that have represented important achievements of IRPPS research results. These additional services and the digitization project help and contribute to a larger diffusion and visibility of the scientific research products as well as to a better evaluation process through the use and improvement of alternative metrics together with traditional ones.

Participation of doctoral students in online social networks

PurposeThis paper aims to examine the use of online social networks by doctoral students.Design/methodology/approachA quantitative online survey was conducted – 448 doctoral students from 15 universities and 11 research institutes in Lithuania were asked about their participation in both academic and non-academic online social networks.FindingsThe results show that despite efforts to link academics to society, doctoral students are not supported by universities/research institutes nor are doctoral students trained for this purpose, including regarding such threats as offensive posts. Additionally, more comprehensive information is disclosed in academic social networks, but these networks are less common and less frequently used.Research limitations/implicationsInternational doctoral students in Lithuania cover about 4.4 per cent of the total population of doctoral students. They were not invited to participate in the survey. Furthermore, doctoral students consider any online social network as their professional (academic) network, as was found from our results. This resulted in the confusion of our definition of academic online social networks.Practical implicationsLearning about the diverse online roles doctoral students may take could be facilitated were doctoral students to receive clear and consistent awareness-raising and develop self-awareness in the importance of the roles, the most central online social networks and potential threats, and related institutional support to address them.Originality/valueThis study provides results on how engagement of doctoral students in online social networks might affect their links with society and what academic institutions should promote in doctoral education.

User behaviors and network characteristics of US research universities on an academic social networking site

Academic social networking sites are important communication tools commonly used by scholars. In order to obtain an understanding of how scholars at US higher education institutions utilize these sites, this study took ResearchGate (RG) as an example and collected data from 168,059 users from 61 US higher education institutions at three research activity levels as defined by the Carnegie Classification. A hierarchical cluster analysis was conducted, and four clusters of institutions with different behavior patterns were observed. The results indicate that US higher education institutions play different roles based on their academic influence in the network and demonstrate distinct behaviors in overall participation, information seeking, and information sharing. Users from universities of higher academic influence exhibited a preponderance for presentation behavior and were popular in the network, while scholars at moderate research-level institutions were active in seeking behavior as well as self-improvement. However, those at lower levels were comparatively inactive. The hierarchical clustering result also suggests that user behavior on this academic social networking site reflects the academic research activity level and level of academic influence accurately and effectively. These findings show a positive correlation between levels of scholarly output and utilization of academic social networking sites. This study also contributes to the ongoing efforts in understanding the scholarly use of academic social networking sites, and to the debate on whether associated alternative metrics (altmetrics) serve as supplementary evaluation measures of scholarship in higher education. The practical implications of the study are also discussed.

Exploring the utility of Academia.edu: a SWOT analysis

PurposeThis paper aims to analyze the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats of the academic social networking, Academia.edu.Design/methodology/approachSWOT analysis is performed to evaluate the platform.FindingsAcademia.edu provides resources that enable scholars to heighten the impact and reach of their research within a digitally networked environment.Originality/valueThis is one of the first studies to evaluate the scholarly merits of Academia.edu.

Anatomy of scholarly information behavior patterns in the wake of academic social media platforms

As more scholarly content is born digital or converted to a digital format, digital libraries are becoming increasingly vital to researchers seeking to leverage scholarly big data for scientific discovery. Although scholarly products are available in abundance—especially in environments created by the advent of social networking services—little is known about international scholarly information needs, information-seeking behavior, or information use. The purpose of this paper is to address these gaps via an in-depth analysis of the information needs and information-seeking behavior of researchers, both students and faculty, at two universities, one in the USA and the other in Qatar. Based on this analysis, the study identifies and describes new behavior patterns on the part of researchers as they engage in the information-seeking process. The analysis reveals that the use of academic social networks has notable effects on various scholarly activities. Further, this study identifies differences between students and faculty members in regard to their use of academic social networks, and it identifies differences between researchers according to discipline. Although the researchers who participated in the present study represent a range of disciplinary and cultural backgrounds, the study reports a number of similarities in terms of the researchers’ scholarly activities.

Academic Social Network-Based Recommendation Approach for Knowledge Sharing

Academic information overload has brought researchers great difficulty due to the rapid growth of scientific articles. Methods have been proposed to help professional readers find relevant articles on the basis of their publications. Although effectively sharing publications is essential to spreading knowledge and ideas, few studies have focused on knowledge sharing from an author perspective. This study leverages the online academic social network to propose a recommendation approach for knowledge sharing. In our approach, we integrate researcher-level and document-level analyses in the same model. Our model works in two stages: 1) researcher-level analysis and 2) document-level analysis. The former combines research topic relevance, social relations, and research quality dimension, and the latter uses the machine learning method to learn the vector representation for each word. Online social behavior information is also leveraged to enhance readers' short-term interests. Our approach is deployed in ScholarMate, a prevalent academic social network. Compared with other baseline methods (CB, LDA, and part of the proposed approach), our approach significantly improves the accuracy of recommendations. Moreover, our method can disseminate papers efficiently to readers who have no publications.

Factors that Promote Knowledge Sharing on Academic Social Networking Sites: An Empirical Study

Studies into Knowledge Sharing continues to attract attention. This is because it has been identified as an effective learning and researching approach. Perhaps this is due to the proliferation and enhanced interaction of modern social networks. Although previous literature argues for a relationship between the use of Social Networking Sites, Engagement and Knowledge Sharing, some recent studies disagree. This paper, therefore, seeks to validate the relationship between the use of social networking sites, academic Engagement and Knowledge Sharing using websites solely designed for academic activities. A modified version of the Social Capital Theory was used to design a questionnaire and data was collected from 336 participants and analyzed. The findings provided evidence that Academic Social Networking Sites support all the indicators of the Social Capital dimensions: Social Interaction Ties, Trust, Reciprocity, Identification, Shared Language and Shared Vision. However, Identification was the only significant predictor of Engagement, whereas Engagement supported Knowledge Sharing. Considering that studies on generic SNS have found significant relationship between other Social Capital dimensions and Engagement, future work needs to focus on the causation of the non-significant relationship observed in this study.

The prevalence of green and grey open access: Where do physical science researchers archive their publications?

The Canadian Institute of Health Research (CIHR) implemented an open access policy for its grant recipients in 2008. We used bibliographic data from the Web of Science to find out how CIHR-funded researchers in the physical sciences self-archived their publications. We also examined the self-archiving policies of the journals in which the researchers published, and compared the citation rates of two different self-archiving approaches: the green open access route (deposit in an institutional or subject repository) and the grey open access route (deposit in an academic social network or personal/departmental website). Only 14% of the articles were openly accessible through the green open access route, while 37% could be accessed through the grey open access route. We cannot ascribe the low uptake of green open access to publishers’ self-archiving policies, as almost all journals allowed self-archiving through the green open access route. Authors deposited 31% of their publications in ResearchGate, the most popular self-archiving option in our study, while they deposited only 2.1% of their publications in institutional repositories, the least popular option. The citation rates of the various self-archiving approaches did not differ significantly. Our results suggest that it may be time to rethink how to achieve open access.

Bookmarks Recommendation in Bibsonomy using Community Detection

Several academic social networks have emerged to help researchers who need to search for documents relevant to their interests. The recommendation has been adopted in many websites to suggest relevant documents to users according to their profiles. However, many academic social networks and digital libraries still lack recommendations. In this paper, we propose a new document recommendation approach for the academic social bookmarking website: Bibsonomy. In our method, we use a community detection technique to identify related users. Then, for each target user, the recommended documents are selected from their learning communities. Experimental results show that the proposed method performs better than state-of-the-art recommendation methods.

Social media as semiotic technology and social practice: the case of ResearchGate’s design and its potential to transform social practice

ABSTRACTThis article addresses the need for critical approaches to social media by bridging the focus on language and other semiotic resources that characterises discourse studies with the broader perspective on social media as social, cultural, economic and technological constructs that dominates media and cultural studies. Specifically, we propose a model for analysing how social media as semiotic technologies, that is, technologies designed to enable and constrain meaning-making, may transform social practices. By incorporating Van Leeuwen’s [2008. Discourse and Practice: New Tools for Critical Analysis. London: Oxford University Press] framework for the critical analysis of discourse and social practice, the model extends the social semiotic approach developed in recent critical multimodal studies of software such as PowerPoint to social media, which function primarily to provide platforms for and commodify social practices, rather than to offer rich arrays of semiotic resources for creating multimodal texts and artefacts. Using the academic social network site ResearchGate and the practice of research peer review, we illustrate the model’s capacity to account for the ways the design of social media platforms – through the semiotic resources they make available and the ways these are presented – enables and constrains their users’ ability to perform key social practices and has the potential to transform these practices.

Canadian and South African Scholars’ Use of Institutional Repositories, ResearchGate, and Academia.edu

Since their initial development in the early 2000s, institutional repositories (IRs) have proliferated around the globe. Due to low faculty participation, however, content recruitment has often posed a significant challenge for librarians and others promoting their use. Through the last decade, academic social networks (ASNs), such as ResearchGate and Academia.edu, have become popular among scholars as a means to communicate with each other and share their research. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with sixty scholars at six universities in Canada and South Africa to explore their views and practices pertaining to IRs and ASNs. Interviews were transcribed and coded to elucidate trends and themes in the data. The study found that few participants were active supporters of their local IRs. Lack of awareness, time limitations, and concerns regarding copyright remain some of the main obstacles to increased faculty participation. Conversely, more than half of the interviewees were active users of either ResearchGate or Academia.edu. These users valued ASNs both as a means of sharing their work and as tools facilitating connections with their colleagues internationally. Though IRs need not compete with these networks, proponents of open access repositories should be prepared to explain to faculty why they should consider having their research made accessible in a repository though they may already actively share their work through ResearchGate or Academia.edu. Significantly, both ASNs and IRs were more popular among South African than Canadian researchers. It is hoped that the results of the study will be helpful in informing the understanding and decisions of librarians and others working to develop and promote IRs and green open access more broadly.

Sharing notes: An academic social network based on a personalized fuzzy linguistic recommender system

Social networks are Web systems that enable and encourage a collaborative work, making it possible to exchange information between users, which makes them especially useful in many areas. Specifically, they could be used in an academic environment with the aim of improving the educational processes, not replacing, but complementing the most traditional face-to-face models. But nowadays the increasingly widespread use of new technologies and social networks is causing the information we have available to grow disproportionately, making it more difficult and expensive to access information of interest. To alleviate this problem, automatic tools such as recommender systems, could be used to facilitate the accesses to relevant information, that in an academic environment would help to customize the educational processes. So, in this paper we present SharingNotes, an academic social network that can generate personalized recommendations to improve teaching and learning processes. To achieve this goal, it incorporates a hybrid recommender system that uses an ontology to characterize the degrees of trust among network users, and adopts the fuzzy linguistic modeling to improve the representation of information. Then, the use of this platform allows adapting the educational process to the circumstances of each student. The evaluation developed demonstrates the usefulness of this educational social network, as well as the users’ satisfaction while interacting and working with it.

Academic Social Network Sites: Opportunities and Challenges

Academic Social Networking Sites (ASNs) have become one of the most important platforms in modern information and education industries. It will definitely become an essential mechanism to communicate, connect and collaborate among the scholarly community. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive investigation of ASNs such as Academia, ResearchGate, Mendeley and Zotero, and identify the features of ASNs. We also discuss the opportunities for ASNs and provide the challenges. Challenges related to ASNs are: collecting relevant data and identifying data quality, finding evaluation metrics and also developing efficient algorithms. Disciplinary differences in domain area and academic position become the opportunities why academicians use ASNs.

Which US and European Higher Education Institutions are visible in ResearchGate and what affects their RG score?

While ResearchGate has become the most popular academic social networking site in terms of regular users, not all institutions have joined and the scores it assigns to academics and institutions are controversial. This paper assesses the presence in ResearchGate of higher education institutions in Europe and the US in 2017, and the extent to which institutional ResearchGate Scores reflect institutional academic impact. Most of the 2258 European and 4355 US higher educational institutions included in the sample had an institutional ResearchGate profile, with near universal coverage for PhD-awarding institutions found in the Web of Science (WoS). For non-PhD awarding institutions that did not publish, size (number of staff members) was most associated with presence in ResearchGate. For PhD-awarding institutions in WoS, presence in RG was strongly related to the number of WoS publications. In conclusion, a) institutional RG scores reflect research volume more than visibility and b) this indicator is highly correlated to the number of WoS publications. Hence, the value of RG Scores for institutional comparisons is limited.

Users' Distribution and Behavior in Academic Social Networking Sites

Academic social networking sites (SNSs) are growing rapidly. Worldwide, academicians use academic SNSs for many reasons regardless of their nation, gender, position, and discipline. In this paper, the authors extend their previous work in exploring the distribution and behavior of a particular academic SNS (academia.edu) on a large scale. The authors classify users into different groups based on their position, discipline, and continent. This study gives a better understanding of usage patterns in academic SNS, especially in the lack of large-scale studies about different classes of users on academic SNSs.

The The social network analysis and its contribution to the mapping of scientific production in postgraduate programs

This article aims to identify the contribution that the Social Network Analysis (SNA) can offer to the construction of the scientific production in postgraduate programs in Federal Institutions of Higher Education in Brazil. For that, a qualitative and quantitative analysis of 184 dissertations of a stricto sensu postgraduate program of the Federal Fluminense University, during the period from 2015 to 2016, was carried out, emphasizing its network of relationships focused on knowledge areas and on the respective teachers as counselors, participants and guests of the thesis defenses, using the Ucinet software. Based on the literature review, a detailed analysis of the academic work of these two years was also elaborated based on the data registered in the Capes Platform, Sucupira database and on the website of the Laboratory of Technology, Business Management and Environment of the Fluminense Federal University (LATEC / UFF). The themes of the areas of knowledge, trends, and evolution were also analyzed over the periods studied. It is concluded that the results of this system applied in a case, demonstrated the feasibility of the evaluation of the individual attributes and also of the networks as a whole, offering a comparative of their evolution in these two periods explored, thus demonstrating the valuable contribution of SNA in scientific production. This study revealed, at the time of the research, the construction of a first academic social network in this postgraduate program.

An exploratory study on institutional repository, social networking, and bibliographic databases of scholarly communication in Nigeria's academic landscape

This study seeks to explore institutional repository, social networking, and bibliographic databases of scholarly communication in Nigeria. Six institutional repositories (IR) were selected and five leading authors had their works manually crosschecked in two citation indexes and self-archived in social networking sites. The results reveal that faculty members have embraced self-archive on academic social network platforms, while their records in the IR do not reflect this. The study recommends Universities' management to implore academics to self-archive their publications into their IR, while the libraries too could search bibliographic databases and social network sites to update their respective IR platforms.

Exploring the geographies of academic social network sites from a socio-technical perspective

Academic social network sites (ASNS) like ResearchGate and Academia.edu can be analysed as techno-cultural systems through which researchers perform a number of tasks and roles that can be collectively defined as digital scholarship. This study sets out to map empirical Spanish-language research studies on the use of ResearchGate and Academia.edu among scholarly communities. The aim is to verify possible research gaps regarding shared scholarly knowledge and networked learning supported by ASNS. The study is based on a theoretical framework which treats ASNS as networked socio-technical systems that encompass systemic dimensions and individual usage as strictly intertwined elements influencing each other. This occurs at three levels: 1) the socio-economic level, which includes components like ownership, governance, and business model; 2) the techno-cultural level, which includes components associated to technology, user/usage, and content; and 3) the networked-scholar level, which includes components related to networking, knowledge sharing and identity. The research reported here is an extension of a previous study of English-language scientific literature which was carried out with the same methods. The corpus of the study was collected from a search of leading databases of international scientific literature (Web of Science, Scopus and a number of Ibero-American scientific databases). The search yielded 12 papers, which were selected according to a set of criteria and analysed in terms of components of the aforementioned three-level framework. The results show that ResearchGate is attracting greater attention, with a particularly high proportion of studies dedicated to social science areas like library and information sciences and communication science. Analysis at the networked scholar level, encompassing forms through which scholars build their identities and reputation in social spaces, revealed that this was underused. The results highlight a need for more specific studies on open and distributed knowledge exchange generated in ASNS from a networked learning perspective, including both individual and collective scholarly practices. Moreover, increased use of qualitative methods could contribute to shed light on new practices among scholars for building reputation and professional identity.

Preferencias de investigadores y prácticas institucionales/disciplinares en la difusión y socialización de los resultados de investigación

The objective of this work is to contribute to the knowledge of the practices and preferences of university researchers when they have to disseminate and socialize their publications in open access institutional repositories and academic social networks. This study is based on the premise that this phenomenon is influenced both by discipline and by institutional belonging. With a bibliometric-scientometric approach, the presence of the academic community and the volume and temporal coverage of its production deposited in institutional repositories (RIS) and the academic social network ResearchGate (RG) are studied. The case of university researchers from three faculties of an Argentine public university is studied, characterizing the population according to gender, age group, academic degree, and category formalized within the research system. It is concluded that there is a higher presence of the academic community in the repositories than in the social network, although the average of documents per university researcher is higher in the latter. The community of the faculties of Exact Sciences and Natural Sciences have a high presence in RG, unlike those in Humanities and Social Sciences. There are more women than men in the different platforms, in contrast to what happens with the average number of documents per university researcher, which is also higher the higher the age, the researcher category, and the academic degree achieved. Temporary coverage and current production are higher in RG than in the RIS, in addition to a relationship between the age of the documents and the age group of the population.