Profiling Use of Third-Party Research Repository Services

Background

How significant is use of third-party repository services?

In a recent post I explained Why I’m Evaluating ResearchGate. In the post I summarised the reasons why I felt that researchgate.net could provide an additional service for depositing research papers which would complement Opus, the University of Bath institutional repository. But what others services might also be relevant? And which services are hosting the largest numbers of research papers?

In order to seek answers to these questions, I used Google to provide a measure of the size of a number of hosting services for PDFs and the number of PDFs they host. The services I analysed were:

• Researchgate.net: This site is described in Wikipedia as “a social networking site for scientists and researchers to share papers, ask and answer questions, and find collaborators. The site has been described as a mash-up of “Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn” that includes “profile pages, comments, groups, job listings, and ‘like’ and ‘follow’ buttons”. Members are encouraged to share raw data and failed experiment results as well as successes, in order to avoid repeating their peers’ scientific research mistakes.“
• Academia.edu: This site is described in Wikipedia as “a platform for academics to share research papers. It was launched in September 2008. Currently the site is approaching 2 million registered users.^[2] The platform can be used to share papers, monitor their impact, and follow the research in a particular field.“
• Mendeley.com: Thus site is described in Wikipedia as “a desktop and web program for managing and sharing research papers,^[2] discovering research data and collaborating online. It combines Mendeley Desktop, a PDF and reference management application (available for Windows, Mac and Linux) with Mendeley Web, an online social network for researchers.^[3][4][5] Mendeley requires the user to store all basic citation data on its servers – storing copies of documents is at the user’s discretion“.
• Citeulike.org: This site is described in Wikipedia as “based on the principle of social bookmarking [the service] is aimed to promote and to develop the sharing of scientific references amongst researchers. In the same way that it is possible to catalog web pages (with Furl and del.icio.us) or photographs (with Flickr), scientists can share information on academic papers with specific tools (like CiteULike) developed for that purpose“.
• Scribd.com: This site is described in Wikipedia as “a document-sharing website that allows users to post documents of various formats, and embed them into a web page using its iPaper format“.

Many researchers will probably be familiar with the first four services listed. The fifth service, scribd.com, is included in order to explore whether a general-purpose PDF repository service could have a role to play in supporting the sharing of research publications.

Findings for the Coverage of the Services

Google was used in order to provide an estimate of the coverage of the services, including the total number of resources which have been indexed by Google and the number of PDF files. The findings are given in the following table. Note that the figures were initially collected on 6 February 2013. In order to check the volatility of the findings the searches were repeated on 11 February.

Search for	Search Term	Nos. of results	Date
Service: researchgate.net
Total number of resources	site:researchgate.net	55,300,000	6 Feb 2013
		56,100,000	11 Feb 2013
Total number of PDF files	site:researchgate.net filetype:pdf	2,980,000	6 Feb 2013
		2,910,000	11 Feb 2013
Service: academia.edu
Total number of resources	site:academia.edu	12,500,000	6 Feb 2013
		12,400,000	11 Feb 2013
Total number of PDF files	site:academia.edu filetype:pdf	4,930	6 Feb 2013
		4,740	11 Feb 2013
Service: mendeley.com
Total number of resources	site:mendeley.com	3,310,000	6 Feb 2013
		3,150,000	11 Feb 2013
Total number of PDF files	site:mendeley.com filetype:pdf	3,840	6 Feb 2013
		4,020	11 Feb 2013
Service: citeulike.org
Total number of resources	site:citeulike.org	35,600,000	6 Feb 2013
		35,700,000	11 Feb 2013
Total number of PDF files	site:citeulike.org filetype:pdf	244	6 Feb 2013
		30	11 Feb 2013
Service: scribd.com
Total number of resources	site:scribd.com	61,300,000	6 Feb 2013
		166,000,000	11 Feb 2013
Total number of PDF files	site:scribd.com filetype:pdf	–	6 Feb 2013
		371,000,000	11 Feb 2013
Service: issuu.com
Total number of resources	site:issuu.com	10,300,000	6 Feb 2013
		26,100,000	11 Feb 2013
Total number of PDF files	site:issuu.com filetype:pdf	48,800	6 Feb 2013
		48,800	11 Feb 2013

It seems that Scribd hosts a very large number of resources (although a finding of 3 PDF resources originally found was discarded as the results seemed to be unreliable).

However since Scribd is a general purpose repository service, it was felt that ResearchGate provides a repository of a large number of PDFs resources which are more relevant for researchers. In light of this confirmation of the popularity of Researchgate an additional survey was carried out which reported on use of the service across Russell Group universities.

Findings for Institutional Use of Academic.edu and Researchgate

On 1 August 2012 a Survey of Use of Researcher Profiling Services Across the 24 Russell Group Universities was published on this blog. This survey has been repeated in order to detect changes in the use of ResearchGate. Since the original survey also provided an analysis of Academia.edu, this was also included in the current survey. The results are given in the following table. Note that the data is also available in Google Spreadsheets.

Ref. No.	Institution	Academia.edu (members)		ResearchGate
				Aug 2012		Feb 2013
				Members	Publications
		Aug 2012	Feb 2013*			Members	Publications
1	University of Birmingham	1,210	1,562	782	19,515	1,439	22,068
2	University of Bristol	1,018	1,189	641	21,249	1,251	23,701
3	University of Cambridge	3,020	3,439	972	39,713	1,699	42,419
4	Cardiff University	906	1,071	646	9,596	1,272	10,696
5	Durham University	1,001	1,189	273	1,151	662	7,152
6	University of Exeter	919	1,106	269	5,150	652	6,191
7	University of Edinburgh	2,079	2,479	1,181	25,918	2,065	28,486
8	University of Glasgow	1,004	1,212	613	20,041	1,224	21,733
9	Imperial College	798	896	1,096	30,404	1,377	34,202
10	King’s College London	1,420	1,748	1,406	18,264	2,241	23,391
11	University of Leeds	1,657	1,871	848	16,944	1,455	19,560
12	University of Liverpool	866	989	582	16,475	1,146	18,749
13	London School of Economics	1,131	1,354	191	1,838	407	2,449
14	University of Manchester	2,279	2,590	1,113	25,139	2,188	29,675
15	Newcastle University	906	1,039	704	17,307	1,348	17,376
16	University of Nottingham	1,299	1,529	970	20,513	1,559	20,145
17	University of Oxford	3,842	4,469	1,221	38,224	1,967	39,861
18	Queen Mary	715	849	228	5,232	898	6,013
19	Queen’s University Belfast	689	774	479	10,750	864	11,699
20	University of Sheffield	1,082	1,235	823	18,127	1,659	20,149
21	University of Southampton	1,083	1,265	670	16,887	1,371	18,325
22	University College London	2,776	3,162	1,624	35,035	2,878	38,550
23	University of Warwick	1,143	1,349	448	8,098	873	9,334
24	University of York	986	1,180	386	4,841	696	5,179
	TOTAL	33,829	39,546	18,166	426,414	33,191	477,103
	Increase (%)		14.5%			82.7%	11.9%

Note: *  As described in the previous survey the numbers of Academia.edu members is obtained by entering the name of the institution in the search box.

Conclusions

Nos. of items deposited in Researchgate in Aug 2012 (blue) & Feb 2013 (red)

Nos. of Researchgate Members in Aug 2012 (blue) & Feb 2013 (red)

As illustrated in the accompanying diagrams it seems that the numbers of researchers who have signed up for a ResearchGate account has grown significantly over the past six months, and now stands at over 33,000 users, a growth of 82.7%. The numbers of papers which have been deposited by researchers at Russell Group universities has also grown to a total of over 477, 000 items. However since this represents a growth of 11.9% over six months it suggests that new members are providing metadata records only and not depositing the full text.

I therefore conclude that the conclusions I reached in my post which explained Why I’m Evaluating ResearchGate were correct and ResearchGate is a service which I should use not only to provide a presence about my research activities but also to host my research papers. I do wonder, though, whether the large numbers of items which have been deposited in ResearchGate is due to promotion of the service with the Russell Group universities or represents a bottom-up approach, in which researchers have recognised the benefits of the service and recommended it to their peers?

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