The ecosystem of research tools for scholarly communication

Abstract

PurposeNumerous research tools exist but their usage among researchers across the different phases of the research cycle of scholarly communication remains unknown. This research aims to address this knowledge gap by mapping the research tools frequently used by global researchers against the various phases of the research cycle of scholarly communication.Design/methodology/approachThis research adopts a descriptive research design and conducts a cross-tabulation of secondary data consisting of 20,663 useable responses in a global survey of research tools for scholarly communication. This research also administered a survey to academic experts to classify the research tools according to traditional, modern, innovative and experimental categories.FindingsThis research reveals the six phases of the research cycle (i.e. discovery, analysis, writing, publication, outreach and assessment) and the research tools of scholarly communication frequently used by researchers worldwide in each phase as a whole and by roles, disciplines, regions and career stages. Notably, this research indicates that most of the research tools used by researchers are classified as “modern” and “innovative”.Originality/valueThe original insights herein should be useful for both established and early career researchers to gain and share research insights, as well as policymakers and existing and aspiring service providers who wish to improve the utility and usage of research tools for scholarly communication. Notably, this research represents a seminal endeavor at enhancing a global survey (secondary research) using a follow-up expert survey (primary research), which enabled the organization of research tools for scholarly communication into four refined categories. In doing so, this research contributes finer-grained insights that showcase the importance of keeping up with the advancement of technology through the use of modern, innovative and experimental research tools, thereby highlighting the need to go beyond traditional research tools for scholarly communication.

Editorial: Special selection on contemporary bibliometric analytics

“…Readers may be interested in some related articles on whether authors play fair or manipulate Google Scholar bibliometric indicators, such as h-index and i10-index (Loan and Shah, 2022), and the analysis of Sci-Hub use with Google Trends (Behboudi et al ., 2021); Chen et al . (2021) studied the effect of interdisciplinary components' citation intensity on scientific impact, whether proceedings papers in science fields have higher impacts than those in social science and humanities (Yang and Qi, 2021), characteristics analysis and evaluation of discourse leading for academic journals (Wang, 2022), the ecosystem of research tools for scholarly communication (Rao et al ., 2022), the scientific outcome in the domain of grey literature (Wani and Ganaie, 2022), early discovering highly cited academic papers (Tang et al ., 2023) and textbook citations (Maleki et al ., 2023).…”