Lecture at the Scuola di Dottorato in Scienze Pedagogiche dell’Educazione e della Formazione, Università di Padova, 7 June 2017

1. Academic social networks site as
networked socio-technical systems
for scholarly communication:
the case of ResearchGate and
Academia.edu
Stefania Manca
Istituto per le Tecnologie Didattiche
Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche
Genova
Padova, 7 Giugno 2017

2. Aim of the seminar
To reflect on the two most popular academic social network sites,
Academia.edu and ResearchGate, as digital sites:
to build a professional profile
connect with colleagues
share publications
support scholarly communication among researchers of multiple
disciplines.

3. Contents of the seminar
1. Theories and concepts
2. A framework to analyse academic social network sites
3. The case of ResearchGate and Academia.edu
4. Practical activity

4. 1. Theories and concepts
 Boyer’s model of scholarship
 Digital scholarship
 Boyer’s model updated
 E-Research, Research 2.0, Science 2.0
 Networked Participatory Scholarship, Social Scholarship
 Social Media and scholarly communication
 Social network sites and academic social network sites

5. Boyer’s model of scholarship (1990)
1.Discovery – The creation of new knowledge in a specific area or discipline. This is
often taken to be synonymous with research - basic research
2.Integration – Focused on interpretation and interdisciplinary work. It is ‘making
connections across the disciplines, placing the specialties in larger context,
illuminating data in a revealing way, often educating non-specialists’ –
interdisciplinary work
3.Application – Related to the concept of service, engagement with the wider world
outside academia, public engagement activities, input into policy and general
media discussions – applied research
4.Teaching – ‘The work of the professor becomes consequential only as it is
understood by others’ - informed and studied teaching practices

6. Digital scholarship
“Digital scholarship is the use of digital
evidence, methods of inquiry, research,
publication and preservation to achieve
scholarly and research goals. Digital
scholarship can encompass both scholarly
communication using digital media and
research on digital media” (Wikipedia,
2017).
“Digital scholarship is really shorthand for
the intersection of three technology related
developments, namely:
• digital content
• networked distribution
• open practices
The point at which the circles intersect is
labelled 'transformative‘” (Weller, 2011)

7. Boyer’s model updated (Nicholas et al., 2016)
1.The scholarship of research: the individual or collaborative creation of new knowledge.
This large category of scholarly activities is formed of four major sub-activities: 1)
producing research output; 2) communicating, sharing and networking; 3)
disseminating and publishing research findings; 4) evaluating research;
2.The scholarship of integration: the arraying of extant knowledge into larger intellectual
patterns, often within a wider, cross-disciplinary context;
3.The scholarship of application: the application of disciplinary knowledge and skill to
societal/practical problems;
4.The scholarship of teaching: the conveying of the human store of knowledge to new
generations;
5.The scholarship of co-creation: the participation of teachers, students and
practitioners in the increasingly converging processes of knowledge production and
transmission.

8. E-research, Research 2.0, Science 2.0
“The term E-research (alternately spelled eResearch) refers to the use of information
technology to support existing and new forms of research. E-research extends e-
Science and cyberinfrastructure to other disciplines, including the humanities and social
sciences” (Wikipedia, 2017)
“Research 2.0 (alternatively named Science 2.0) is said to describe ‘the ongoing evolution of
the modus operandi of doing research and organising science’ (European Commission, 2013),
where the availability of low cost Internet infrastructures constitutes a key enabling factor of
emerging research practices at individual and collective level” (Esposito, 2017)
“Science 2.0 is a suggested new approach to science that uses information-sharing and
collaboration made possible by network technologies. It is similar to the open
research and open science movements and is inspired by Web 2.0 technologies” (Wikipedia,
2017)

9. Networked Participatory Scholarship
Networked Participatory Scholarship is a new form of scholarship that
examines the relationship between scholarly practice and technology
and explores how online social networks invite emergence of a new
form of scholarship.
It is the emergent practice of scholars’ use of participatory
technologies and online social networks to share, reflect upon,
critique, improve, validate, and further their scholarship
(Veletsianos & Kimmons, 2012)

10. Social Scholarship 1/2
“Social scholarship seeks to leverage social media affordances (ie, promotion of
users, their interconnections and user-generated content) and potential values
(ie, knowledge as decentralized, co-constructed, accessible and connective) to
evolve the ways in which scholarship is accomplished in academia”
(Greenhow & Gleason, 2014)

11. Social Scholarship 2/2
1. Social Scholarship of Discovery: More transparency in the process of publication and research.
Disseminate Information: scholars use SM to change the way research and information are disseminated (e.g.,
blogs and Twitter)
Promote Publications and Ideas: SM allow faculty members to spread their work beyond just academic circles,
even potentially targeting specific audience segments.
Collaborate and Connect with Other Scholars: use of SM to enhance collaboration and build connections (e.g.,
ResearchGate and Academia.edu).
2. Social Scholarship of Integration: SM enable scholars to collaborate with interdisciplinary scholars on
large-scale research projects.
3. Social Scholarship of Teaching: Teaching can be transformative in providing more active and co-
created learning experiences by engaging students in the learning process.
4. Social Scholarship of Application: Scholars are enabled to support a bottom-up approach in
addressing community issues.

12. Scholarly communication
How scholars find information, create knowledge, and communicate among themselves,
with students, and beyond the academy with other audiences.

13. Social media in scholarly communication
The A to Z of social media for academia,
https://www.timeshighereducation.com/a-z-social-media

14. Digital scientific tools for scholarly
communication
http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2016/03/04/academic-profile-
services-many-mirrors-and-faces-for-a-single-ego/

15. Social network sites
“A social network site is a networked communication platform in
which participants
1) have uniquely identifiable profiles that consist of user-supplied
content, content provided by other users, and/or system-level
data;
2) 2) can publicly articulate connections that can be viewed and
traversed by others; and
3) 3) can consume, produce, and/or interact with streams of user-
generated content provided by their connections on the site”
(Ellison & boyd, 2013)

16. Academic social network sites
Academic social network sites (ASNS) are digital platforms
for information sharing and systems for open dissemination
of scholarly practices that are increasingly transforming
scholarship communication and academic identity.

17. Concerns and tensions
Lack of time
Too many academic sites
Not perceived to be useful
Social aversion
Lack of digital
competence
Privacy and security concerns
Unreliable information
online
Blurring boundaries of
personal and
professional identities
Promote or perish!
Update or stagnate!

18. 2. A framework to analyse academic social
network sites
1. Academic social network sites as networked socio-technical
systems
2. Academic social network sites and social capital

19. Academic social network sites as networked
socio-technical systems
 Technological systems are determined at the same time by social forces and by
technological features.
 Design, implementation and use of information technologies are the result of
interactions and negotiations between technology, users and organizational
contexts (Huysman & Wulf, 2006).
 Digital scholarship as a complex techno-cultural system that includes
technological innovations and dominant cultural values, along with differential
identity markers and norms of practice and prestige (Stewart, 2015).
 Academic social network sites, being digital platforms and infrastructures that
support digital scholarship, can be considered socio-material phenomena.

20. A multilevel framework
Manca & Raffaghelli (2017), van Dijck (2013)

21. Academic social network sites and social
capital 1/2
 Social capital theory encompasses the capacity of social networks to
produce goods for mutual benefit through the aggregation of actual or
potential resources and more or less institutionalized relationships of
mutual acquaintance or recognition that can change over time
(Bourdieu, 1986).
 These resources can take the form of useful information, personal
relationships or group networks (Putnam, 2000). Moreover, they may
be concerned with employment connections, civic benefits or indices
of psychological well-being, such as self-esteem and satisfaction with
life (Granovetter, 1973; Helliwell & Putnam, 2004).

22. Academic social network sites and social
capital 2/2
 Scholarly practices are highly influenced by scholars’ online social
capital and that their online networks influence their thinking and
outlook on scholarly practices, including advocacy of openness and
transparency (Costa, 2016).
 A focus on social capital not only highlights individual knowledge
sharing, but also frames scholarly communities as knowledge-sharing
entities that are formed by trust, a sense of mutuality and recognition
by peers (Fulk & Yuan, 2013; Huysman & Wulf, 2006).

23. Types of social capital
1. Structural opportunity addresses the network structure of people’s
interactions and their configuration and organization.
 It relates to opportunities for members to connect with each other and encompasses
social needs like the creation of social relationships and their maintenance over time.
2. Cognitive ability addresses the ability to connect with each other from a
cognitive perspective and concerns shared meanings, codes, representations
and interpretations that are at stake in the development of communication
between actors
 It satisfies social needs like meaning negotiation, nuanced social activity, and
transactive (distributed group) memory.
3. Relational motivation addresses motivations for knowledge sharing and
includes parameters that influence relationships like trust, norms and values,
obligations, expectation and identity.
 It enables the satisfaction of social needs like generalised reciprocity, establishment
of trust and identity building.

24. Academic social network sites as networked socio-technical
systems that afford social capital among scholars

25. 3. The case of ResearchGate

26. and Academia.edu

27. Google Scholar is NOT an ASNS

28. ResearchGate
1. Founded in 2008 by the physicists Ijad Madisch and Sören
Hofmayer along with computer scientist Horst Fickenscher.
2. More than 12 million members distributed worldwide in 193
countries.
3. The majority of the members (60%) belong to a wide range of
hard scientific disciplines such as medicine, biology, engineering,
chemistry, computer science and physics.
4. Stated mission: “To connect the world of science and make
research open to all”.

29. ResearchGate: The socio-economic layer
1. OWNERSHIP: a for-profit company headquartered in Berlin that counts
more than 260 employees.
2. GOVERNANCE: mostly managed through the Terms and Conditions that
regulate the provider-user relationship (e.g., the Statement on Privacy and
Data Protection operates in full compliance with German laws; email
addresses are processed solely to send information or notifications about
the Service; RG will definitely not store any personal data of former users
who have cancelled their subscription, not will they sell or otherwise share
personal data with third parties, etc.).
3. BUSINESS MODEL: largely based on a wide range of free-of-charge
services supplemented with subscription-based services like the Job
Openings section for posting job ads.

30. ResearchGate: The techno-cultural layer
1. TECHNOLOGY: RG signals automatically which other people one may be interested in
contacting and adding to his/her network; provides News Feeds that allow users to
monitor members’ activities; prompts endorsements of researchers for their skills and
expertise and suggests new researchers to follow; gives users the option to share
bibliographic references to their own work.
2. USAGE: Platform usage can be passive, i.e. limited to reading and acquiring information
about what others post, or can regard active participation, such as posting new content
or activating new connections. One way of engaging actively in the network is to
participate in the Questions discussion threads by posing research questions and/or
sharing expertise.
3. CONTENT: RG affords the publication of diverse types of scientific output: publications,
grey literature such as open datasets, drafts, results from failed experiments, and open
reviews of papers that users have read or worked with. A recently added feature allows
users to organise research outputs into Projects so that publications and other research
outputs are grouped according to research topics.

31. ResearchGate: The networked-scholar layer
1. NETWORKING: The possibility to build an individual network of contacts is mostly based
on the Follow feature, through which users are given access to new and updated
information and opportunities to locate relevant expertise. To strengthen ties in their
personal network, researchers can also use the Recommend resources function to
spotlight publications, projects, etc.
2. KNOWLDEGE SHARING: The knowledge sharing component chiefly regards the adding or
uploading of research products. It also includes Commenting on publications and
projects and asking and replying to questions via the Questions feature; use of the
Search function for retrieving useful information and maintaining distributed memory;
the possibility to browse the existing list of Q&As; in the personal profile a tab for
displaying Expertise and skills (users can browse this when seeking to locate
competences useful for their research).
3. IDENTITY: User identity is mostly conveyed through the Profile, the main feature for
constructing visibility and reputation. Information displayed in a researcher’s profile
includes: a short bio; visualization of research products and projects; list of Followers and
Following; engagement in Q&A sessions; and awards and achievements. Moreover, RG
provides three types of scores: RG Score, RG Reach and h-index.

32. Academia.edu
1. Founded in 2008 by Richard Price as a site for sharing research
papers after he finished his Ph.D at Oxford University.
2. Almost 50 million accounts and attracts over 36 million unique
visitors a month.
3. The platform is more popular in Arts and Humanities and to a
lesser extent in Social Sciences and Economics.
4. Stated mission: “Academia.edu is a platform for academics to
share research papers. The company’s mission is to accelerate the
world’s research”.

33. Acdemia.edu: The socio-economic layer
1. OWNERSHIP: a for-profit company headquartered in San Francisco with a
small team of 18 people.
2. GOVERNANCE: the site’s Terms of Use grant users the right to download,
view and print any Academia.edu content solely for personal and non-
commercial purposes. Members grant Academia.edu a worldwide,
revocable, non-exclusive, transferable license to exercise any and all rights
under copyright, in any medium.
3. BUSINESS MODEL: it is largely based on provision of a wide range of free-of-
charge services that are supplemented by premium accounts, mostly
organised around enhanced analytics, full text search of PDFs and a Job
Board for advertising academic vacancies.

34. Academia.edu: The techno-cultural layer
1. TECHNOLOGY: the Home provides a constant news feed that updates users on new
uploads, bookmarked publications, user actions like joining or commenting on a
discussion session and publications Recommended by one’s contacts. It also features
functions like Suggested Sessions and Suggested Academics for increasing one’s
connectivity on the basis of similar research interests. Moreover, Academia.edu members
can invite others to join Academia.edu using the platform’s automated invitation system.
2. USAGE: Academia.edu offers a unique feature called Sessions that allows users to create
a special page where peers and colleagues can leave general comments on papers or line-
specific annotations.
3. CONTENT: Academia.edu affords the publication of diverse types of scientific products,
including papers, books, book chapters, drafts, but also conference presentations and
teaching material.

35. Academia.edu: The networked-scholar layer
1. NETWORKING: Users build an individual network of contacts mostly using the Follow
feature, through which they subscribe to contacts’ updates without being automatically
reciprocated. The list of each user’s Followers, Following and Co-authors can be accessed
via their profile by clicking on separate links.
2. KNOWLDEGE SHARING: it regards the adding or uploading of research products such as
publications, drafts and teaching materials. It also includes contributing to Sessions
pages, where users can leave general comments on papers or line-specific annotations.
The Search function allows users to search for papers, people, research interests and
affiliations (full text search of PDFs is also available, but only for premium accounts).
3. IDENTITY: The Profile feature displays various information: a short bio; research
interests; contact details; number of Followers, Following and Co-authors; and lists of
research products. In terms of reputation, the profile also includes a Total Views tally, a
“top” percentile designation and an Author Rank which is a function of the PaperRanks
of the papers on the user’s profile. The service also provides an analytics dashboard,
which gives the user an overview of how others have interacted with their own
publications. However, detailed analysis is accessible only with a premium account.

36. Controversial issues and disadvantages
 Spam (aggressive marketing policies and email bombing)
 Commercial, not academic company. Although Academia.edu has a “.edu”
URL, it isn’t run by a higher education institution.
 Copyright issues
 ‘Users’ not ‘Academics’
 Harvesting of data available on the web to automatically generate
nominal profiles that are not actually owned by the people concerned
 No automatic updates
 Lack of transparency of indicators and scores (RG Score)

37. 4. Practical activity

38. References
Bourdieu, P. (1986). The forms of capital. In J. Richardson (Ed.), Handbook of Theory and Research for the Sociology of Education (pp. 241-258). New York, NY: Greenwood.
Boyer, E. L. (1990). Scholarship reconsidered: Priorities of the professoriate. Princeton, NJ: Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching.
Costa, C. (2016). Double gamers: academics between fields. British Journal of Sociology of Education, 37(7), 993-1013.
Esposito, A. (Ed.) (2017). Research 2.0 and the Impact of Digital Technologies on Scholarly Inquiry. Hershey, PA: IGI Global.
Ellison, N. B., & boyd, d. (2013). Sociality through Social Network Sites. In Dutton, W. H. (Ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Internet Studies (pp. 151-172). Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
Fulk, J., & Yuan, Y. C. (2013). Location, Motivation, and Social Capitalization via Enterprise Social Networking. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 19(1), 20-37.
Granovetter, M. S. (1973). The strength of weak ties. American Journal of Sociology, 78(6), 1360-1380.
Greenhow, C., & Gleason, B. (2014). Social scholarship: Reconsidering scholarly practices in the age of social media. British Journal of Educational Technology, 45(3), 392-402.
Helliwell, J. F., & Putnam, R. D. (2004). The social context of well-being. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London B: Biological Sciences, 359(1449), 1435-1446.
Huysman, M., & Wulf, V. (2006). IT to support knowledge sharing in communities, towards a social capital analysis. Journal of Information Technology, 21(1), 40-51.
Nicholas, D., Herman, E., Clark, D. (2016). Scholarly Reputation Building: How does ResearchGate Fare? International Journal of Knowledge Content Development & Technology, 6(2), 67-92.
Manca, S., & Raffaghelli, J. E. (2017). Towards a Multilevel Framework for Analysing Academic Social Network Sites: A Networked Socio-Technical Perspective. In Proceedings of the 4th
European Conference on Social Media Research, Vilnius, Lithuania 4-5 July 2017.
Putnam, R. D. (2000). Bowling alone: the collapse and revival of American Community. New York, NY: Simon and Schuster.
Stewart, B. E. (2015). In Abundance: Networked Participatory Practices as Scholarship. International Review of Research in Open and Distributed Learning, 16(3), 318-340.
van Dijck, J. (2013). The Culture of Connectivity. A Critical History of Social Media. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
Veletsianos, G., & Kimmons, R. (2012). Networked Participatory Scholarship: Emergent techno-cultural pressures toward open and digital scholarship in online networks. Computers &
Education, 58(2), 766-774.
Weller, M. (2011). The Digital Scholar. How technology is transforming scholarly practice. London/New Delhi/New York/Sydney: Bloomsbury.

39. Thank you! 
Email: stefania.manca@itd.cnr.it
Skype: stiven65
http://www.itd.cnr.it/
http://www.cnr.it/people/stefania.manca
Twitter: @StefaniaManca
LinkedIn: http://it.linkedin.com/in/stefaniamanca
ResearchGate: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Stefania_Manca/
Academia.edu: https://cnr-it.academia.edu/StefaniaManca