SlideShare presentations, citations, users, and trends: A professional site with academic and educational uses

Abstract

SlideShare is a free social web site that aims to help users to distribute and find presentations. Owned by LinkedIn since 2012, it targets a professional audience but may give value to scholarship through creating a long term record of the content of talks. This article tests this hypothesis by analysing sets of general and scholarly-related SlideShare documents using content and citation analysis and popularity statistics reported on the site. The results suggest that academics, students and teachers are a minority of SlideShare uploaders, especially since 2010, with most documents not being directly related to scholarship or teaching. About two thirds of uploaded SlideShare documents are presentation slides, with the remainder often being files associated with presentations or video recordings of talks. SlideShare is therefore a presentation-centred site with a predominantly professional user base. Although a minority of the uploaded SlideShare documents are cited by, or cite, academic publications, probably too few articles are cited by SlideShare to consider extracting SlideShare citations for research evaluation. Nevertheless, scholars should consider SlideShare to be a potential source of academic and non-academic information, particularly in library and information science, education and business.

Measuring Societal Impacts of Research With Altmetrics? Common Problems and Mistakes

“…This may be primarily an academic and educational impact indicator (Thelwall and Kousha, 2008) and can be generated by automated search engine queries. In contrast, SlideShare presentation citations seem to reflect professional impact for the fields in which this site is important (Thelwall and Kousha, 2017b). Blog citations count (usually) scientific blogs translating research papers for a general audience (Shema et al ., 2015).…”

Social media and altmetrics

“…Even so, some scholars do use ResearchGate to create author profiles, share and archive publications, seek collaborators, communicate work in progress, and build and compare scholarly reputation (Kramer & Bosman, 2016;Yan & Zhang, 2018). The platform is dominated by recent articles, which attract about three times as many views as older articles (Thelwall & Kousha, 2017). Similarly, a study conducted by Academia.edu employees found that papers uploaded to this site were cited more frequently than others (Niyazov et al, 2016).…”

“…Unlike traditional SNS, activity on ASNS may be more closely linked to academic practice. The number of times that an article has been viewed in ResearchGate has a positive correlation with citation counts, suggesting that the site reflects scholarly-related activities (Thelwall & Kousha, 2017). ResearchGate scores have been shown to have medium correlations with citation-based ranking systems .…”

A biblioteconomia no slideshare: interações, capital social e orientações temáticas

“…A adesão por estudantes, professores e profissionais das mais diversas áreas tem promovido um aumento significativo do uso do SlideShare que tem registrado mais de 70 milhões de visitantes únicos mensais, com cerca de 13.000 novas apresentações adicionados diariamente (GUEDES, 2016), tendo atingido inclusive, em janeiro de 2016, a marca de 18 milhões de uploads (THELWALL; KOUSHA, 2016).…”