Étiquette : ResearchGate

Competitive performativity of academic social networks: the subjectivation of competition on ResearchGate

Auteur de l’article Par Hans Dillaerts
Date de l’article 19 décembre 2024

Authors : Stephan Pühringer, Georg Wolfmayr

This paper develops a better understanding of the explicit and implicit implications of the academic field’s competitization, with a specific focus on the role that academic social networks and platforms (ASNPs) play in this process. While ASNPs are embedded within a broad and complex ecology of academic competition we show that particularly ResearchGate offers a broad variety of tools for competitive subjectivation and thus can be seen as an important organizer and promoter of competition in academia.

By applying a mixed-methods approach combining a structural analysis and a questionnaire study, we examine how and to what extent the platform ResearchGate contributes to the competitive subjectivation of its users. Therefore, we differentiate between suggested and enacted subjectivation.

Concerning differences in age, gender and disciplinary background, our results show that ResearchGate is used more by younger and male researchers and especially younger researchers also perceive their work significantly more in a competitive context and thus also tend to act more competitively. While metric research evaluation is assessed as most important in the natural sciences and economics and rather unimportant in the humanities, subjectivation via the use of ResearchGate is perceived higher in the humanities, which are still less confronted with the competition ecology in academia.

URL : Competitive performativity of academic social networks: the subjectivation of competition on ResearchGate

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1093/reseval/rvae048

Étiquettes Academic Social Networks, Georg Wolfmayr, ResearchGate, scientific communication, Stephan Pühringer

Open Access, Scholarly Communication, and Open Science in Psychology: An Overview for Researchers

Auteur de l’article Par Hans Dillaerts
Date de l’article 2 mai 2024

Author : Laura Bowering Mullen

Scholarly communication, Open Access (OA), and open science practices in Psychology are rapidly evolving. However, most published works that focus on scholarly communication issues do not target the specific discipline, and instead take a more “one size fits all” approach. When it comes to scholarly communication, research practices and traditions vary greatly across and within disciplines.

This monograph presents a current overview that aims to cover Open Access (OA) and some of the newer open science-related issues that are affecting Psychology. Issues covered include topics around OA of all types, as well as other important scholarly communication-related issues such as the emergence of preprint options, the evolution of new peer review models, citation metrics, persistent identifiers, coauthorship conventions, field-specific OA megajournals, and other “gold” OA psychology journal options, the challenges of interdisciplinarity, and how authors are availing themselves of green and gold OA strategies or using scholarly networking sites such as ResearchGate. Included are discussions of open science strategies in Psychology such as reproducibility, replication, and research data management.

This overview will allow psychology researchers to get up to speed on these expansive topics. Further study into researcher behavior in terms of scholarly communication in Psychology would create more understanding of existing culture as well as provide researchers with a more effective roadmap to the current landscape. As no other single work is known to provide a current look at scholarly communication topics that is specifically focused on Psychology, this targeted overview aims to partially fill that niche.

URL : Open Access, Scholarly Communication, and Open Science in Psychology: An Overview for Researchers

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1177/21582440231205390

Étiquettes Academic Social Networks, gold open access, Laura Bowering Mullen, megajournal, open access, open access publishing, open science, Preprint, Psychology, ResearchGate, Scholarly Communication, scientific communication

Academic social networks metrics: an effective indicator for university performance?

Auteur de l’article Par Hans Dillaerts
Date de l’article 10 février 2022

Authors : Łukasz Wiechetek, Zbigniew Pastuszak

Social networks have become popular among researchers and scientists. Specialized platforms for researchers offer many metrics and indicators which are used to evaluate various scientists and assess the strength of their impact. In this article the authors perform systematic comparison between the main university level ResearchGate (RG) metrics: total RG Score, number of publications, number of affiliated profiles and ARWU.

A tool for acquiring the RG metrics of research units and a framework for calculating alternative university ranks was implemented and tested. As a point of reference the ranking system of the Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU, 2019) was used. The authors used a web scraping technique to acquire data. Data analysis was based on Spearman’s rho and multiple linear regression (MLR).

Ten additional ranks were developed and compared with the benchmark ranking. The k-means clustering method was used to identify the groups of ARWU universities. The research results show that the metrics provided by specialized social networks can be used for the assessment of universities, however, an in-depth evaluation requires a more advanced procedure and indicators to measure many areas of scholarly activity like research, integration, application, teaching, and co-creation.

Clustering method showed also that the distance between the ARWU universities measured in values of RG metrics are bigger for the top of the ranking. The university authorities should encourage researchers to use specialized social networks, and train them how to do it, to promote not only their own achievements, but also to increase the impact and recognition of their respective research units.

At the end of the article some limitations of the method used and some practical recommendations for the university authorities were formulated.

URL : Academic social networks metrics: an effective indicator for university performance?

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-021-04258-6

Étiquettes Academic Social Networks, Łukasz Wiechetek, metrics, research evaluation, ResearchGate, scientific communication, Zbigniew Pastuszak

Exploring the social activity of open research data on ResearchGate: implications for the data literacy of researchers

Auteur de l’article Par Hans Dillaerts
Date de l’article 14 janvier 2022

Authors : Juliana Elisa Raffaghelli, Stefania Manca

Purpose

Although current research has investigated how open research data (ORD) are published, researchers’ behaviour of ORD sharing on academic social networks (ASNs) remains insufficiently explored. The purpose of this study is to investigate the connections between ORDs publication and social activity to uncover data literacy gaps.

Design/methodology/approach

This work investigates whether the ORDs publication leads to social activity around the ORDs and their linked published articles to uncover data literacy needs. The social activity was characterised as reads and citations, over the basis of a non-invasive approach supporting this preliminary study.

The eventual associations between the social activity and the researchers’ profile (scientific domain, gender, region, professional position, reputation) and the quality of the ORD published were investigated to complete this picture.

A random sample of ORD items extracted from ResearchGate (752 ORDs) was analysed using quantitative techniques, including descriptive statistics, logistic regression and K-means cluster analysis.

Findings

The results highlight three main phenomena: (1) Globally, there is still an underdeveloped social activity around self-archived ORDs in ResearchGate, in terms of reads and citations, regardless of the published ORDs quality; (2) disentangling the moderating effects over social activity around ORD spots traditional dynamics within the “innovative” practice of engaging with data practices; (3) a somewhat similar situation of ResearchGate as ASN to other data platforms and repositories, in terms of social activity around ORD, was detected.

Research limitations/implications

Although the data were collected within a narrow period, the random data collection ensures a representative picture of researchers’ practices.

Practical implications

As per the implications, the study sheds light on data literacy requirements to promote social activity around ORD in the context of open science as a desirable frontier of practice.

Originality/value

Researchers data literacy across digital systems is still little understood. Although there are many policies and technological infrastructure providing support, the researchers do not make an in-depth use of them.

URL : Exploring the social activity of open research data on ResearchGate: implications for the data literacy of researchers

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1108/OIR-05-2021-0255

Étiquettes Academic Social Networks, Juliana Elisa Raffaghelli, open research data, research data, ResearchGate, scientific practices, Stefania Manca

Use of author identifier services (ORCID, ResearcherID) and academic social networks (Academia.edu, ResearchGate) by the researchers of the University of Caen Normandy (France): A case study

Auteur de l’article Par Hans Dillaerts
Date de l’article 29 septembre 2020

Authors : Christophe Boudry, Manuel Durand-Barthez

The purpose of this paper was to assess the presence of researchers on two author identifier services (ORCID and ResearcherID) and to compare the results with two academic social networks (Academia.edu and ResearchGate) using the categories of discipline, career advancement, and gender in a medium sized multidisciplinary university in France (University of Caen Normandy).

Metrics such as number of publications per researcher, h-indexes, and average number of citations were also assessed. Of the 1,047 researchers studied, 673 (64.3%) had at least one profile on the four sites, and the number of researchers having multiple profiles decreased as more sites were studied.

Researchers with only one profile numbered 385 (36.8%), while 204 (19.5%) had two, 68 (6.5%) had three, and only 16 (1.5%) had four. ResearchGate had by far the highest number of researchers present, with 569 (54.3%), whereas presence on the other sites was about 15%. We found that, apart from Academia.edu, researchers in Sciences, Technology, and Medicine (STM) were over-represented.

Overall, experienced male researchers were over-represented on the sites studied. Our results show that, because of the numerous profiles lacking publication references (particularly on ORCID) and a low presence of researchers on the four sites studied (except for ResearchGate), assessing the number of publications, h-indexes, or average number of citations per article of individuals or institutions remains challenging.

Finally, our data showed that French researchers have not adopted the use of the two author identifier sites (i.e. ORCID and ResearcherID). As long as French researchers remain reticent, these sites will not be able to provide the services for which they were created: addressing the problem of author misidentification, consequently providing exhaustive access to scientific production and bibliometric indicators of individual researchers and their institutions.

URL : Use of author identifier services (ORCID, ResearcherID) and academic social networks (Academia.edu, ResearchGate) by the researchers of the University of Caen Normandy (France): A case study

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0238583

Étiquettes Academia.edu, Academic Social Networks, case study, Christophe Boudry, France, Manuel Durand-Barthez, ORCID, ResearcherID, ResearchGate, scientific communication

Worldwide inequality in access to full textscientific articles: the example ofophthalmology

Auteur de l’article Par Hans Dillaerts
Date de l’article 9 novembre 2019

Authors : Christophe Boudry, Patricio Alvarez-Muñoz, Ricardo Arencibia-Jorge, Didier Ayena, Niels J. Brouwer, Zia Chaudhuri, Brenda Chawner, Emilienne Epee, Khalil Erraïs, Akbar Fotouhi, Almutez M. Gharaibeh, Dina H. Hassanein, Martina C. Herwig-Carl, Katherine Howard, Dieudonne Kaimbo Wa Kaimbo, Patricia-Ann Laughrea, Fernando A. Lopez, Juan D. Machin-Mastromatteo, Fernando K. Malerbi, Papa Amadou Ndiaye, Nina A. Noor, Josmel Pacheco-Mendoza, Vasilios P. Papastefanou, Mufarriq Shah, Carol L. Shields, Ya Xing Wang, Vasily Yartsev, Frederic Mouriaux

Background

The problem of access to medical information, particularly in low-income countries, has been under discussion for many years. Although a number of developments have occurred in the last decade (e.g., the open access (OA) movement and the website Sci-Hub), everyone agrees that these difficulties still persist very widely, mainly due to the fact that paywalls still limit access to approximately 75% of scholarly documents.

In this study, we compare the accessibility of recent full text articles in the field of ophthalmology in 27 established institutions located worldwide.

Methods

A total of 200 references from articles were retrieved using the PubMed database. Each article was individually checked for OA. Full texts of non-OA (i.e., “paywalled articles”) were examined to determine whether they were available using institutional and Hinari access in each institution studied, using “alternative ways” (i.e., PubMed Central, ResearchGate, Google Scholar, and Online Reprint Request), and using the website Sci-Hub.

Results

The number of full texts of “paywalled articles” available using institutional and Hinari access showed strong heterogeneity, scattered between 0% full texts to 94.8% (mean = 46.8%; SD = 31.5; median = 51.3%).

We found that complementary use of “alternative ways” and Sci-Hub leads to 95.5% of full text “paywalled articles,” and also divides by 14 the average extra costs needed to obtain all full texts on publishers’ websites using pay-per-view.

Conclusions

The scant number of available full text “paywalled articles” in most institutions studied encourages researchers in the field of ophthalmology to use Sci-Hub to search for scientific information.

The scientific community and decision-makers must unite and strengthen their efforts to find solutions to improve access to scientific literature worldwide and avoid an implosion of the scientific publishing model.

This study is not an endorsement for using Sci-Hub. The authors, their institutions, and publishers accept no responsibility on behalf of readers.

URL : Worldwide inequality in access to full textscientific articles: the example ofophthalmology

DOI : https://doi.org/10.7717/peerj.7850