Expectations of Health Researchers From Academic Social Network Sites: Qualitative Study

Background Today, academic social network sites' role in improving the quality of education and how investigators conduct their research has become more critical. Objective This study aimed to investigate Iranian health researchers' requirements for academic social network sites from a low-income country perspective. Methods This qualitative study with a phenomenological approach was done in 2020. In this study, 23 researchers in the health system were selected by purposive sampling. Semistructured interviews were used to collect data. Data were analyzed by MaxQDA-10 software and the content analysis method. Results We identified 2 categories of functional and technical characteristics in the study participants' expectations. Functional characteristics included facilitating communication and team activities, managing scientific publications, enhancing the process of conducting research, being informative, and sharing and trading laboratory materials and equipment. Technical characteristics of an academic social network include user management capabilities, high security and privacy, being user-friendly, and other technical features. Conclusions Health researchers emphasized 2 functional and technical characteristics required to meet academic social network sites' expectations.

ResearchGate, a Scientific Social Network, which Is Working as Growing Database and Cannot be Ignored neither Oral and Maxillofacial Surgeons nor Publishers

ResearchGate (RG) was launched in May 2008 by two physicians (Ijad Madisch and Sören Hofmayer) and computer scientist Horst Fickenscher as a social network platform for scientists, which is counting 20 million users.2 RG is also named as networked socio-technical system for scholarly communication3, academic social network site3, and academic social network site4. Citations, reads, RG Score, h-index, comments, personal communication via the platform and much more functions of RG are so impressive for every author. Moreover, the collection of articles` titles and abstracts/summaries with a “search” option made RG a new sophisticated database. The principles of RG are helping to increase the dissemination of practical orientated science like the oral and maxillofacial surgery (OMS). In RG`s we can find the articles from open access OMS journals like Journal of the Korean Association of Oral and Maxillofacial Surgeons,5,6 Oral and Maxillofacial Surgery Cases,7,8 etc. RG option “Citations” is more than useful for editorial offices and publishers as it helps to track the citation in the journals included to Scopus. It facilitates monitoring of the implementation/ compliance of one of the 14 journal selection criteria for inclusion into Scopus. “Citednes of journal articles in Scopus” is important criteria from a category Journal Standing.9 Citation of the articles published in our journal is easy to track with the RG. For example: the article of Le et al10,11 was cited at June 16, 2021 by Weyh et al12,13 published in Atlas of the Oral and Maxillofacial Surgery Clinics. In summary, although discussions about the operation of the ResearchGate exist,14 the benefits of this growing platform as a database should not be underestimated.

Researchgate.net crawler and a new contribution determines sequence (CDS) method.

General and Focus crawlers are the main types of web crawlers used for different goals, with different crawling techniques and architecture. Our crawler was written in Java language using different software and libraries. To test the crawler, it has been run on the academic social network, Researchgate.net from 3 rd.April to 28th.June 2014 and retrieved real data. The crawler consists of three main algorithms to crawl information such as researchers details, publications details, questions/answers activity details. The retrieved data has been analyzed to highlight the performance of Canadian researchers, in the field of Computer Science on Researchgate.net. Data analysis has been done from the collaboration and (alt)metrics perspectives. Among other features Researchgate.net came with “Impact Points” and “RG Score” (alt)metrics. The former builds on ISI Journal Impact Factor, which disregards author’s contribution in its calculations. A new Contribution Determines Sequence (CDS) method has been developed and tested, with all required scripts which showed better performance than other methods.

Researchgate.net crawler and a new contribution determines sequence (CDS) method.

General and Focus crawlers are the main types of web crawlers used for different goals, with different crawling techniques and architecture. Our crawler was written in Java language using different software and libraries. To test the crawler, it has been run on the academic social network, Researchgate.net from 3 rd.April to 28th.June 2014 and retrieved real data. The crawler consists of three main algorithms to crawl information such as researchers details, publications details, questions/answers activity details. The retrieved data has been analyzed to highlight the performance of Canadian researchers, in the field of Computer Science on Researchgate.net. Data analysis has been done from the collaboration and (alt)metrics perspectives. Among other features Researchgate.net came with “Impact Points” and “RG Score” (alt)metrics. The former builds on ISI Journal Impact Factor, which disregards author’s contribution in its calculations. A new Contribution Determines Sequence (CDS) method has been developed and tested, with all required scripts which showed better performance than other methods.

Webometric Analysis of Institutional Repositories of Malaysian Public Universities

An institutional repository (IR) is one of the resources available in most university libraries that have attracted external publishers, search engines and social media to link, share and index IR content. The traditional citation-based indicators of a publication may not reflect the IR quality and have led to the creation of new indicators such as webometrics or web metrics. This study aims to analyse and explore Malaysia’s public university IR visibility, the numbers of an external link, page count, PDF count and URL web mention. We utilised backlinks web crawler and web search engine to collect raw data. A visualisation was created using the force-directed graphing method to interpret the IR network in the webspace. This study revealed that two research universities, Universiti Malaya (UM) and Universiti Putra Malaysia (UPM), dominate web visibility based on webometrics indicators. All non-research universities are at the bottom of the rankings. This study shows institutional repositories from research universities are more visible in academic social networks and digital library sites. In contrast, non-research universities need to improve their visibility by mapping the universities’ IRs websites through hyperlink exchange and collaboration activities between each university and promoting the university publication to the academic social network sites.

Can altmetric mentions predict later citations? A test of validity on data from ResearchGate and three social media platforms

PurposeThe main purpose of this study is to explore and validate the question “whether altmetric mentions can predict citations to scholarly articles”. The paper attempts to explore the nature and degree of correlation between altmetrics (from ResearchGate and three social media platforms) and citations.Design/methodology/approachA large size data sample of scholarly articles published from India for the year 2016 is obtained from the Web of Science database and the corresponding altmetric data are obtained from ResearchGate and three social media platforms (Twitter, Facebook and blog through Altmetric.com aggregator). Correlations are computed between early altmetric mentions and later citation counts, for data grouped in different disciplinary groups.FindingsResults show that the correlation between altmetric mentions and citation counts are positive, but weak. Correlations are relatively higher in the case of data from ResearchGate as compared to the data from the three social media platforms. Further, significant disciplinary differences are observed in the degree of correlations between altmetrics and citations.Research limitations/implicationsThe results support the idea that altmetrics do not necessarily reflect the same kind of impact as citations. However, articles that get higher altmetric attention early may actually have a slight citation advantage. Further, altmetrics from academic social networks like ResearchGate are more correlated with citations, as compared to social media platforms.Originality/valueThe paper has novelty in two respects. First, it takes altmetric data for a window of about 1–1.5 years after the article publication and citation counts for a longer citation window of about 3–4 years after the publication of article. Second, it is one of the first studies to analyze data from the ResearchGate platform, a popular academic social network, to understand the type and degree of correlations.Peer reviewThe peer review history for this article is available at: https://publons.com/publon/10.1108/OIR-11-2019-0364