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

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.