A Survey of Use of Researcher Profiling Services Across the 24 Russell Group Universities

Looking Back

Back in March 2012 in a post on Profiling Staff and Researcher Use of Cloud Services Across Russell Group Universities I summarised usage of Academia.edu, LinkedIn, ResearcherID and Google Scholar Citations across the 2o Russell Group universities. The post highlighted complementary surveys which had been carried out by Jenny Delasalle, who in Twitter profile describes herself as a “Research support Librarian: interested in bibliometrics, copyright, scholarly communications, and all sorts!” based at the University of Warwick. That connection subsequently led to Jenny and I writing a paper which asked “Can LinkedIn and Academia.edu Enhance Access to Open Repositories?” which was presented at the Open Repositories 2012 conference, OR 2012.

As described in a one-minute video summary and a 4 minute slidecast, in our paper Jenny and I described personal evidence which suggested that use of LinkedIn and Academia.edu can help to raise the profile of peer-reviewed papers hosted in institutional repositories if links to the papers are provided in these popular services as this may enhance the Google ranking for the institutional repository.

As described on the Russell Group University Web site: “Through their outstanding research and teaching, unrivalled links with businesses and a commitment to civic responsibility, Russell Group universities make an enormous impact on the economic, social and cultural wellbeing of the UK“. But to what extent are the Russell Group universities making use of researcher profiling services to enhance access to their research outputs, especially, those hosted in institutional open access repositories?

Updated Survey of Russell Group University Use of Researcher Profiling Services

The methodologies which were used in the previous blog posts and repeated for the findings published in our paper has been used again, this time to provide a benchmark for use of these services across the enlarged collection of Russell Group universities, which was enlarged to 24 institutions on 1 August 2012 following the incorporation of Durham and Exeter University, Queen Mary, University of London and the University of York.

In addition to benchmarking four additional institutions, following Jenny Delasalle’s blog post about ResearchGate the ResearchGate service was also included in the survey.

The findings are given in the following table. Note that the data for the LinkedIn, Academia.edu, Google Scholar Citations, ResearcherID and ResearchGate services was collected on 25 July 2012.

Ref. No.	Institution	Academia	LinkedIn	LinkedIn	ResearcherID	Google Scholar Citations	ResearchGate
			(Followers)	(Current)			Members	Impact Points	Publications
1	University of Birmingham	1,210	5,000	5,667	89	131	782	54,959.25	19,515
2	University of Bristol	1,018	4,320	3,477	254	170	641	64,661.22	21,249
3	University of Cambridge	3,020	8,741	7,220	460	330	972	157,728.66	39,713
4	Cardiff University	906	4,287	3,609	468	140	646	26,620.70	9,596
5	Durham University	1,001	2,620	1,904	148	131	273	13,151.25	1,151
6	University of Exeter	919	3,742	2,735	113	77	269	13,099.47	5,150
7	University of Edinburgh	2,079	7,090	6,123	263	236	1,181	87,934.30	25,918
8	University of Glasgow	1,004	3,802	4,099	293	219	613	59,662.76	20,041
9	Imperial College	798	8,981	6,914	465	362	1,096	105,989.84	30,404
10	King’s College London	1,420	5,994	27	380	174	1,406	60,114.47	18,264
11	University of Leeds	1,657	6,273	6,599	225	164	848	45,132.67	16,944
12	University of Liverpool	866	3,926	4,814	166	91	582	44,800.42	16,475
13	London School of Economics	1,131	8,464	2,075	20	95	191	2,825.73	1,838
14	University of Manchester	2,279	7,601	8,244	305	357	1,113	71,887.98	25,139
15	Newcastle University	906	4,275	3,347	173	143	704	51,783.84	17,307
16	University of Nottingham	1,299	6,269	6,703	355	160	970	56,478.57	20,513
17	University of Oxford	3,842	9,447	9,823	402	405	1,221	159,620.47	38,224
18	Queen Mary	715	3,519	2,267	20	139	228	15,556.27	5,232
19	Queen’s University Belfast	689	2,317	185	83	62	479	23,917.28	10,750
20	University of Sheffield	1,082	5,008	5,941	276	174	823	47,573.65	18,127
21	University of Southampton	1,083	4,935	5,162	287	182	670	37,618.63	16,887
22	University College London	2,776	10,866	7,164	709	580	1,624	138,134.10	35,035
23	University of Warwick	1,143	4,350	3,142	216	119	448	18,142.13	8,098
24	University of York	986	2,824	2,394	125	474	386	15,808.07	4,841
	TOTAL	33,829	134,669	109,634	6,147	5,115	18,166		426,414

Corrections:

It was noted that the figures given in this table for the Google Scholar Citation are an underestimate. This appears to be due to the design of the REST interface to the entries.  The table has been updated with the correct figures.

Notes:

• The numbers may be skewed by errors or variants in names of institutions. For example there are 140 people in academia.edu who are associated with the bham.ac.uk rather than the birmingham.ac.uk domain.
• The numbers for Academia.edu and ResearcherID were obtained by a search for the institution’s name. However a link to the findings is not available.
• Searches for ResearcherID were for institution name except for the University of Birmingham which included UK to avoid name clashes.
• The findings for institutions such as Queen’s University Belfast and King’s College London with apostrophes in the institution’s name may be skewed due to different policies on resolving such names.

Discussion

It should be noted that the five services covered in this survey are different and it would be inappropriate to make comparisons across the services – in particular although Academia.edu, ResearcherID, Google Scholar Citations and ResearchGate are intended for the research community, LinkedIn  has a wider remit and, understandably, has a larger audience.

In addition, as described in the Notes, there may be flaws or inconsistencies in the way in which the data was gathered and displayed. In particular it seems that the lack of an agreed institutional ID means that users may associate themselves with different variants of their institution, with this seemingly being the case for institutions contains apostrophes, in particular.

The previous survey and subsequent paper suggested that use of popular social media services by researchers could enhance access to the researchers’ research outputs if links to their outputs were provided from the services.  I am still convinced that this is the case but appreciate that further evidence may be needed in order to convince decision-makers that a coordinated approach to providing links to the content of open access repositories would help to maximise access to the resources.  For now, however, this post is intended to provide a benchmark of use of the services on the launch day for the enlarged group of Russell Group Universities.  In addition I would welcome feedback on the survey methodology, especially from the Russell Group Universities who may find that their information is fragmented across several variants of the institution’s name.

I would also, of course, welcome comments in the implications of the findings and their relevance in the context of the 24 institutions referenced in the survey. Researchgate, for example, appears to have information on over 426K papers ranging from 1.8K at LSE to 39K at the University of Cambridge.  What proportion of research papers hosted in institutional repositories does this cover?  And if the numbers appear low for some institutions does this mean that the institutions should seek to take appropriate actions to increase the numbers, or ignore such findings as it may simply demonstrate the  lack of relevance of the services?

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Paradata:   As described in  a post on Paradata for Online Surveys blog posts which contain live links to data will include a summary of the survey environment in order to help ensure that survey findings are reproducible, with information on potentially misleading information being highlighted.

The data for the Academia, LinkedIn,  Google Scholar Citations,  ResearchGate and ResearcherID was collected on 25 July 2012.

The values for Google Scholar Citation for the universities of Birmingham and Newcastle include ‘UK’ in the search field in order to avoid including information from US and Australian universities with the same name.

It should also be noted that I was logged into the services when I gathered the information.

It should also be noted that the low values for LinkedIn followers for King’s College London and Queen’s University Belfast are felt to be due to the apostrophe used in the institution’s names. For example of search (carried out on 31 July 2012) on LinkedIn for King’s College London gives 3,758 hits but a search for Kings College London gives 328 hits.