Specialized Social Networks Usage By Slovenian And Polish Business Researchers – A Comparative Study On Researchgate

The usage of specialized social network sites (SNS) is growing rapidly. Social networks are powerful tools used for communication, entertainment and education. They are also used for establishing new professional networks, conducting business or scientific projects and accelerating careers. In the academic field ResearchGate (RG), Academia.edu, ResearcherID and Mendeley are commonly used to share researcher’s scientific work, build scientific portfolios or compare achievements with a wide group of researchers all over the world. This article presents the quantitative analysis results addressing the usage of RG by researchers from business schools and departments in Poland and Slovenia. We collected names of researchers from the schools’ web pages. In each country three departments/schools were chosen: a top, middle and low leveled business school. The RG profiles for all employed academics (n=896: Slovenian – 31.6%, Polish – 68.4%) were explored. The statistical analyses showed that the main differences in RG metrics distribution can be observed for RG score value and number of citations. The RG score is strongly correlated positively with the number of citations, published items and reads. The researchers from Slovenia have a significantly higher RG metric score except for the number of following researchers. We also found some differences between female and male RG users. Male users’ profiles have higher RG values for both number of reads and number of citations. The clustering procedure identified five groups of RG users: • Cluster 1: Balanced users (n=16) can be described as a set of researchers with high and equal scores for all four RG metrics. • Cluster 2: Appreciated users (n=127) are researchers that have above average RG scores and number of published items. They probably published a lot but in less prominent journals, therefore do not have as many reads and citations; however, this is compensated by a relatively high RG value. • Cluster 3: Beginners (n=296) are researchers that have below average scores for all RG metrics. Their profile has a very low RG value and very few publications items. • Cluster 4: Knocking users – have a lot of citations but are not rewarded with high RG scores. • Cluster 5: Poets – publish papers that others want to read but contain no citable content. The performed literature review, data analysis and authors’ experiences show that more and more researchers use social network sites to present and exchange their achievements. However, universities’ management also use SNS to assess academics and improve the recruitment processes, therefore more research addressing usage of these kind of tools is strongly needed.