Motivations for self‐archiving on an academic social networking site: A study on researchgate

Abstract

This study investigates motivations for self‐archiving research items on academic social networking sites (ASNSs). A model of these motivations was developed based on two existing motivation models: motivation for self‐archiving in academia and motivations for information sharing in social media. The proposed model is composed of 18 factors drawn from personal, social, professional, and external contexts, including enjoyment, personal/professional gain, reputation, learning, self‐efficacy, altruism, reciprocity, trust, community interest, social engagement, publicity, accessibility, self‐archiving culture, influence of external actors, credibility, system stability, copyright concerns, additional time, and effort. Two hundred and twenty‐six ResearchGate users participated in the survey. Accessibility was the most highly rated factor, followed by altruism, reciprocity, trust, self‐efficacy, reputation, publicity, and others. Personal, social, and professional factors were also highly rated, while external factors were rated relatively low. Motivations were correlated with one another, demonstrating that RG motivations for self‐archiving could increase or decrease based on several factors in combination with motivations from the personal, social, professional, and external contexts. We believe the findings from this study can increase our understanding of users' motivations in sharing their research and provide useful implications for the development and improvement of ASNS services, thereby attracting more active users.

An Investigation on the Use by Academic Researchers of Knowledge from Scientific Social Networking Sites

“…They found that researchers prefer short answers with positive action-oriented statements, revealing a pragmatic approach oriented at finding solutions to specific problems. Lee and colleagues conducted a survey among ResearchGate users on the motivations for using the platform by considering factors from personal, professional, social and external contexts [48]. They found that accessibility of knowledge was the main reason for using the system.…”

An Investigation on the Use by Academic Researchers of Knowledge from Scientific Social Networking Sites

“…They found that researchers prefer short answers with positive action-oriented statements, revealing a pragmatic approach oriented at finding solutions to specific problems. Lee and colleagues conducted a survey among Researchgate users on the motivations for using the platform [46]. They found that accessibility of knowledge was the main reason for using the system.…”

“…SSNSs provide researchers with powerful means to find solutions to specific difficulties met during their work [40; 42; 45]. As a repository a SSNS provide easy access to publications and other documents [46]. Through the questions and answers function they offer the possibility to ask for advice to solve specific problems [40].…”

Academic social networking: From individual acts to institutional, disciplinary, national, and social phenomena

“…This presentation will briefly introduce a recent study about researchers' motivations for self‐archiving their information on ResearchGate. Self‐archiving is defined as “the action of uploading any kind of academic work, material, or research data to personal websites or institutional or subject repositories to make them freely available to and accessible by the public online” (Lee et al, ). We proposed a motivational framework including 18 factors, including enjoyment, personal and professional gain, reputation, learning, self‐efficacy, altruism, reciprocity, trust, community interest, social engagement, publicity, accessibility, self‐archiving culture, influence of external actors, credibility, system stability, copyright concerns, and additional time and effort.…”

“…In recent years, academic social networking sites (ASNSs) are being adopted as a new scholarly communication platform by individual academics that reflects a combination of academic capital and social networking skill (Gruzd et al, 2012;Thelwall & Kousha, 2015). Researchers have utilized ASNSs not only to discover, read, share, and archive publications, but also to seek and share research information, build networks, and present professional images (Arshad & Ameen, 2017;Bianchini, 2012;Dermentzi, Papagiannidis, Toro, & Yannopoulou, 2016;Lee, Oh, Dong, Wang, & Burnett, 2019;Xia et al, 2016).…”