ResearchGate and Academia.edu: Academic Social Networks

Abstract

Social networking sites can seem frivolous and pointless to academics, but specialized academic social networking sites are gaining popularity in certain disciplines and with certain faculty. These academic social networks were briefly discussed in a previous column, as was the new intersection between social media and scholarly publishing, but academic social networks are an interesting online space that merit their own discussion (Ovadia 2013). This column looks at ResearchGate (https://www.researchgate.net) and Academia.edu, two of the more popular academic social networks. Social networking functionality is increasingly common in all kinds of tools, though. Citation management products, like Mendeley, Zotero, and CiteU-Like, in addition to managing citations for users, also have social media features, allowing users to find and follow each other. However, those three tools are primarily citation managers that also have social networking functionality. ResearchGate and Academia.edu are primarily social networking sites. Online social networks exist along a continuum. Something like Facebook, while used for a multitude of purposes, is probably most frequently used for informal communication between friends of some degree. Something like LinkedIn is used for professional communication and career networking. Academic social networks are even more specific, catering to those associated with academic institutions and specializing in academic activities like sharing papers and data sets. They also provide publication analytics and facilitate the exchange of information. Both ResearchGate and Academia.edu allow users to post public questions to the community, much like Quora, another online question-and-answer site. Both networks group users by

Why Do Academics Use Academic Social Networking Sites?

“…Its purpose is to connect geographically distant researchers and allow them to communicate continuously on the basis of the open-world concept and the elimination of distance as an important factor in working relations. A secondary goal is to create access to studies even before they are completed for purposes of peer review and exchange of ideas (Ovadia, 2014). According to statistics on its site (https://www.researchgate.net/about), ResearchGate had more than eight million users in 2015.…”

Investigating practices for building an ethical and sustainable scholarly identity with online platforms and social networking sites

“…Online platforms and metrics such as ORCID IDs (Akers et al, ) and other specialized academic SNS (Ovadia, ) facilitate the creation and development of SIs. Researchers have connected achievements, such as tenure and promotion, to altmetrics gathered from forums like ResearchGate (Megwalu, ) and Academia.edu (Duffy & Pooley, ; Ortega, ; Thelwall & Kousha, 2014).…”

Про Підхід До Застосування Наукових Соціальних Мереж Для Максимізації Представлення Інформації Про Наукові Публікації

“…Зокрема, наведе-но перелік спеціалізованих соціальних мереж для наукових працівників. Автори робіт [3,5,6,[8][9][10][11] підкреслюють важливість наявності як профілю з інформацією про самого наукового працівника, так і переліку його наукових публікацій в таких спеціалізованих соцмережах:…”