Networked Scholarship and Motivations for Social Media use in Scholarly Communication

Research on scholars’ use of social media suggests that these sites are increasingly being used to enhance scholarly communication by strengthening relationships, facilitating collaboration among peers, publishing and sharing research products, and discussing research topics in open and public formats. However, very few studies have investigated perceptions and attitudes towards social media use for scholarly communication of large cohorts of scholars at national level. This study investigates the reasons for using social media sites for scholarly communication among a large sample of Italian university scholars (N=6139) with the aim of analysing what factors mainly affect these attitudes. The motivations for using social media were analysed in connection with frequency of use and factors like gender, age, years of teaching, academic title, and disciplinary field. The results point out that for the most used tools the influence of the variables examined was higher in shaping scholars’ motivations. In fact, frequency of use, age, years of teaching, and disciplinary field were found to be relevant factors especially for LinkedIn and ResearchGate-Academia.edu, while gender and academic title seemed to have a limited impact on scholars’ motivations for all social media sites considered in the study. Considerations for future research are provided along with limitations of the study.

[1]  Ian Rowlands,et al.  Social media use in the research workflow , 2011, Inf. Serv. Use.

[2]  Gunilla Widén,et al.  Scholarly communication and possible changes in the context of social media: A Finnish case study , 2011, Electron. Libr..

[3]  Daqing He,et al.  User participation in an academic social networking service: A survey of open group users on Mendeley , 2014, J. Assoc. Inf. Sci. Technol..

[4]  E. Boyer.  Scholarship Reconsidered: Priorities of the Professoriate , 1990 .

[5]  Melissa Goertzen,et al.  Wired Academia: Why Social Science Scholars Are Using Social Media , 2013, 2013 46th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences.

[6]  Francisco Segado-Boj,et al.  Use of Twitter among Spanish communication-area faculty: Research, teaching and visibility , 2015, First Monday.

[7]  M. Ranieri,et al.  Exploring Digital Scholarship: A Study on Use of Social Media for Scholarly Communication among Italian Academics , 2017 .

[8]  Crystal Fulton,et al.  Impact of social networking tools on scholarly communication: a cross-institutional study , 2015, Electron. Libr..

[9]  Katy Jordan,et al.  Academics and their online networks: Exploring the role of academic social networking sites , 2014, First Monday.

[10]  Ali Saif Al-Aufi,et al.  An investigation of digital scholarship and disciplinary culture in Oman , 2010, Libr. Hi Tech.

[11]  R. König,et al.  Academia Goes Facebook? The Potential of Social Network Sites in the Scholarly Realm , 2014 .

[12]  R. Goodfellow.  Scholarly, digital, open: an impossible triangle? , 2014 .

[13]  Omar Almousa,et al.  Users' classification and usage-pattern identification in academic social networks , 2011, 2011 IEEE Jordan Conference on Applied Electrical Engineering and Computing Technologies (AEECT).

[14]  M. Engelmann.  The Philosophical Investigations , 2013 .

[15]  Stefania Manca,et al.  Facebook and the others. Potentials and obstacles of Social Media for teaching in higher education , 2016, Comput. Educ..

[16]  Yuri Niyazov,et al.  Open Access Meets Discoverability: Citations to Articles Posted to Academia.edu , 2016, PloS one.

[18]  Angela Glotfelter.  Social media in academia: Networked scholars , 2017, New Media Soc..

[19]  Mike Thelwall,et al.  Academia.edu: Social network or Academic Network? , 2014, J. Assoc. Inf. Sci. Technol..

[20]  Christine Greenhow,et al.  Social scholarship: Reconsidering scholarly practices in the age of social media , 2014, Br. J. Educ. Technol..

[21]  J. Dijck.  The Culture of Connectivity: A Critical History of Social Media , 2013 .

[22]  Gail Salaway,et al.  The ECAR Study of Undergraduate Students and Information Technology, 2008 , 2007 .

[23]  C. Costa.  The participatory web in the context of academic research: Landscapes of change and conflicts , 2013 .

[24]  Eden Dahlstrom,et al.  ECAR Study of Undergraduate Students and Information Technology, 2014. , 2014 .

[25]  Nancy L. Maron,et al.  Current Models of Digital Scholarly Communication: Results of an Investigation Conducted by Ithaka for the Association of Research Libraries. , 2008 .

[26]  Bonnie Stewart,et al.  In abundance: Networked participatory practices as scholarship , 2015 .

[27]  D. Nicholas,et al.  Scholarly reputation in the digital age and the role of emerging platforms and mechanisms , 2016 .

[28]  Deborah Lupton.  ‘Feeling better connected’: academics’ use of social media , 2014 .

[29]  Eileen Scanlon,et al.  Digital scholarship considered : how new technologies could transform academic work. , 2010 .

[30]  Helen Donelan.  Social media for professional development and networking opportunities in academia , 2016 .

[31]  M. Ranieri,et al.  "Yes for sharing, no for teaching!": Social Media in academic practices , 2016, Internet High. Educ..

[32]  Castl Survey.  The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching , 1910, Nature.

[33]  Royce Kimmons,et al.  Networked Participatory Scholarship: Emergent techno-cultural pressures toward open and digital scholarship in online networks , 2012, Comput. Educ..

[34]  Executive Summary,et al.  Assessing the Future Landscape of Scholarly Communication: An Exploration of Faculty Values and Needs in Seven Disciplines - Executive Summary , 2010 .

[35]  R. Procter,et al.  Adoption and use of Web 2.0 in scholarly communications , 2010, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A: Mathematical, Physical and Engineering Sciences.

[36]  Amany M. Elsayed,et al.  The Use of Academic Social Networks Among Arab Researchers , 2016 .

[37]  Mark D. Shermis,et al.  An Introduction to Survey Research and Data Analysis (2nd ed.). , 1990 .

[38]  José Luis Ortega,et al.  Disciplinary differences in the use of academic social networking sites , 2015, Online Inf. Rev..

[39]  Ángel Borrego,et al.  Use of social networks for academic purposes: a case study , 2013, Electron. Libr..

[40]  Barbara Kieslinger,et al.  Academic peer pressure in social media: Experiences from the heavy, the targeted and the restricted user , 2015, First Monday.

[41]  T. Hooley.  The digital scholar: how technology is transforming scholarly practice , 2013 .

[42]  Eileen Scanlon,et al.  Scholarship in the digital age: Open educational resources, publication and public engagement , 2014, Br. J. Educ. Technol..

[43]  S. Greener,et al.  Seeking and sharing research information on social media: A 2013 survey of scholarly communication , 2014 .