Scientists online: A framework for the analysis of Internet profiles

Abstract

Many scientists use the Internet to present themselves and their work. The content they create could be used to improve the awareness and communication within the scientific community. This requires a sound understanding of the contents on scientists’ profiles, especially with regard to their structure. Existing literature offers mostly basic categorisation, focusing only on single platforms. This article presents a study of scientists’ profiles on institutional and private Web pages, social networking services, blogs, and microblogs. The aim of the study was to describe structures within the profile contents. For this purpose, 79 profiles belonging to 15 German scientists were identified and analysed using the constructivist grounded theory method. The result was a framework, suitable for structuring and further analysis of scientists’ profiles. The framework describes three levels for the study of profiles: profile networks, profile instances, and content units. The content on the profiles can be classified with regard to its type, verbosity, and placement. The developed framework serves as a basic structure for further research into scientists’ online self–presentation.

Researchers' use of social network sites: A scoping review

“…studied online discussions in the forum of an e-journal. Bukvova's (2011) analyzed various online profiles of researchers in order to create a framework for their online self-presentation.…”

“Meet our group!”:

“…although I took into consideration previous research on the content of other online genres used by scholars for self-representation (Bukvova, 2011;Hyland, 2012), I did not start from a priori coding list, but rather generated the codes from the data. Coding was an iterative process, which involved working through the documents several times and refining codes or merging those that were minimally different, until they described the data appropriately.…”

“…Academics are increasingly resorting to digital genres to enhance their visibility, publicize their research activity and reach various audiences (Bukvova, 2011;Herman & Nicholas, 2019;Hyland, 2012;Kjellberg & Haider, 2018;Kousha & Thelwall, 2014;Luzón, 2017 literacies to reconsider what it means to produce academic texts in the 21 st century. They stress the need to address the changes that digital genres "imply for academic literacy practices" (Hyland & Hamp-Lyons, 2002: 9), to consider academic texts from a multimodal perspective and to recognize the salience of linguistic diversity in academic production (Lillis & Tuck, 2016).…”

“…Following previous research on online scholarly communication (e.g. Bukvova, 2011;Hyland, 2012;Luzón, 2017), I analyze the content included on the websites (i.e. the type of information provided).…”

Journal Combat

“…Many factors have contributed to this perversion, but major among them are (1) the exponential growth of journals and the journal industry, 6–8 (2) the adoption of journal metrics as the measure of quality rather than the written content of the article, 9 –27 and (3) the intrusion of the Internet into all aspects of academic life. 28–30…”