Information exchange on an academic social networking site: A multidiscipline comparison on researchgate Q&A

TL;DR

This study analyzes how scholars from different disciplines exchange information on ResearchGate Q&A, revealing the influence of question intent and diverse resource sharing, and offers insights for improving academic social networking interfaces.

Contribution

It provides a comparative analysis of scholarly interactions across disciplines on ResearchGate, highlighting factors influencing information exchange and suggesting interface improvements.

Findings

Questioner’s intent impacts interaction more than discipline.

Responses include diverse resources like citations and contact info.

Discipline differences affect response types and content.

Abstract

The increasing popularity of academic social networking sites (ASNSs) requires studies on the usage of ASNSs among scholars and evaluations of the effectiveness of these ASNSs. However, it is unclear whether current ASNSs have fulfilled their design goal, as scholars' actual online interactions on these platforms remain unexplored. To fill the gap, this article presents a study based on data collected from ResearchGate. Adopting a mixed-method design by conducting qualitative content analysis and statistical analysis on 1,128 posts collected from ResearchGate Q&A, we examine how scholars exchange information and resources, and how their practices vary across three distinct disciplines: library and information services, history of art, and astrophysics. Our results show that the effect of a questioner's intention (i.e., seeking information or discussion) is greater than disciplinary factors in some circumstances. Across the three disciplines, responses to questions provide various resources, including experts' contact details, citations, links to Wikipedia, images, and so on. We further discuss several implications of the understanding of scholarly information exchange and the design of better academic social networking interfaces, which should stimulate scholarly interactions by minimizing confusion, improving the clarity of questions, and promoting scholarly content management.