Investigating Science Researchers’ Presence on Academic Profile Websites: A Case Study of a Canadian Research University

Abstract

Researchers are increasingly using academic profile websites to organize and showcase their research outputs. Using the faculty at the science departments of the University of Saskatchewan, Canada as the study object, this research explores how science researchers used four academic profile websites: ResearchGate, Google Scholar Citations, Academia.edu, and ORCID. It was found that 78% of the researchers had established at least one academic profile, with ResearchGate being the most popular platform, Google Scholar Citations the second, followed at some distance by ORCID and Academia.edu. A high percentage of ORCID users did not list any of their publications, meaning their presence on ORCID was merely symbolic. We also found that the social interaction functions provided by ResearchGate were not well adopted. Findings from this study call for the improvement of the workflow of adding publications to ORCID profile.