Authors : Sarah Marcq, Aline Bouchard, Isabelle Mauger Perez, Benjamin Bober, Christophe Boudry
As author identifier services (AIDs) and academic social networks (ASNs) have become increasingly central to scholarly communication in the last decade, it is important to study how these tools are being used and how far researchers are involved in these services.
This study aims to assess the evolution of the presence of researchers from 2019 to 2023, on three AIDs (ORCID, ResearcherID and IdHAL) and on two ASNs (ResearchGate and Academia) categorized by discipline and career advancement in a medium-sized multidisciplinary university in France (University of Caen Normandy).
The total number of publications found on each of the five sites studied was assessed to evaluate the ability of these sites to provide an accurate view of the scientific output of individuals and their institution.
In this case, for each of the researchers we need to determine whether they had a profile on any website studied, and to record the number of their publications. As main results, the number of profiles has increased across the five sites studied over the period 2019–2023.
This increase is very important on two of the five sites studied: IdHAL and ORCID (330% and 159% increase, respectively), while it is more moderate on the other three sites (less than 30%). This illustrates the result of incentive policies implemented in France in recent years concerning IdHAL and ORCID.
The analysis of the number of publications on each profile in 2019 and 2023 across the five sites studied showed large differences in terms of the total number of publications included in profiles, highlighting the inability of these sites to qualify a population of researchers by considering the number of publications available on these different sites.
To complement this study, future research should consider analysing the content and methods of data entry on these sites, particularly ORCID, as well as the frequency with which this data is updated, especially in relation to the development of different providers in the context of open science.