Investigating the Scientific Activity of the Authors of Highly Cited Articles in the ResearchGate and its Impact on the Scientometric Indicators in the Google Scholar Citation Database(Case Study: iMetrics Field)

Document Type : Original Article

Author
Mehri Sedighi
Information Science Research Department, Iranian Research Institute for Information Science and Technology (IranDoc), Tehran, Iran
10.22034/aimj.2023.189577
Abstract
The main aim of this research is to study the scientific activity of the authors of highly-cited articles in the iMetrics field in the ResearcGate scientific social network and its impact on the scientometric indicators in the Google Scholar citation database. This study is a basic and applied research. The research community consists of the authors of the highly-cited articles in the field of iMetrics, indexed at the Scopus database in 2010-2019. In the first step of this research, all articles published in two core journals in the field of imetrics, namely Scientometrics and Journal of informetrics in the period under study are extracted from Scopus database.The extracted articles have been sorted in descending order based on the number of citations and the top 200 articles have been selected as the sample for review in terms of citation rate. The authors of these articles, who are members of the ResearchGate social network and also have profiles on Google Scholar, were then identified. Then, in the second step of the research, the relationship between the alternative metrics of the authors of the ResearchGate and the productivity indicators of these authors in the Google Scholar system was examined. The findings showed that due to the low correlation coefficient between the variables, there is not much relationship between the alternative measures of ResearchGate member authors and the H-index as well as the i10 index of the same authors in Google Scholar. In general, it can be said that although ResearchGate and other scientific social networks increase research communication and sharing of scientific products, this issue can be effective in the quantity of research outputs and increasing the visibility of scientific products, but to determine the actual usefulness of these media in practice , can be analyzed analytically by conducting separate researches in other thematic fields and on a wider scale.

Keywords

Ale-Ebrahim, N., Salehi, H., Embi, M. A., Habibi, F., Gholizadeh, H. & Motahar, S. M. (2014). Visibility and citation impact. International Education Studies, 7(4), 120-125.
Bardakcı, S., Arslan, Ö. & Ünver, T. K. (2018). How scholars use academic social networking services. Information Development, 34(4), 334-345.
Batooli, Z., Nadi Ravandi, S. & Sabahi Bidgoli, M. (2016). Evaluation of scientific outputs of Kashan University of Medical Sciences in Scopus Citation Database based on Scopus, ResearchGate, and Mendeley Scientometric Measures. Electronic physician, 8(2), 2048 –2056.
Bong, Y.B. & Ale-Ebrahim, N. (2017). The Rise of Alternative Metrics (Altmetrics) for Research Impact Measurement. Asia Research News 2017. Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=2945838
Ding, J., Liying, Y., & Qing, L. (2013). Measuring the academic impact of researchers by combined citation and collaboration impact. In 14th International Society of Scientometrics and Informetrics Conference (ISSI), Vienna, Austria, 15–19 July, pp. 1177–1187.
Ebrahimy, S., Mehrad, J., Setareh, F., & Hosseinchari, M. (2016). Path analysis of the relationship between visibility and citation: the mediating roles of save, discussion, and recommendation metrics. Scientometrics, 109(3), 1497-1510.
Egghe, L. (2012). Five years “Journal of Informetrics”. Journal of Informetrics, 6(3), 422-426.
Erfanmanesh, M., Rohani, V. A. & Abrizah, A. (2012). Co-authorship network of scientometrics research collaboration. Malaysian Journal of Library & Information Science, 17(3), 73-93.
HLWIKI International. (2015). Author impact metrics from http://hlwiki.slais.ubc. ca/index.php?title=Author_impact_metrics&oldid=142757 (accsed 8 April 2020).
Keramatfar, A., Nourmohammadi, H., Esparaein, F, Aghamolaee, F. & Atash, F. (2015). Does ResearchGate show researchers’ performance? Case of Shahed University. Conference Paper. https://www.researchgate.net/ publication/ 270957008 (accessed April 8, 2022).
Leydesdorff, L., Bornmann, L., Marx, W. & Milojevic, S. (2014). Referenced Publication Years Spectroscopy applied to iMetrics: Scientometrics. Journal of Informetrics, 8(1), 162-174.
Madhusudhan, M. (2012). Use of social networking sites by research scholars of the University of Dehli: A study. The International Information & Library Review, 44, 100-113. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.iilr.2012.04.006
Milejevic, S. & Leydesdorff, L. (2013). Information Metrics (iMetrics): a research specialty with a socio-cognitive identity? Scientometrics, 95(1), 141-157.
Ortega, J.L. (2015). Relationship between altmetric and bibliometric indicators across academic social sites: The case of CSIC’s members. Journal of Informetrics, 9 (1), 39-49.
Sababi, M., Marashi, S.A., Pourmajidian, M., Tabatabaei, S., Darki, F., Sadrzadeh, M., Dehghani, M., Zandie, A., Zim, M., Yousefi, M., Jamalkhah, M., Tabatabaei, S., Safaeifard, F., Talaei, A., Sobat, M., Moakedi, F. & Nejadi, P. (2017). How accessibility influences citation counts: The case of citations to the full text articles available from ResearchGate. Roars Transactions. A Journal on Research Policy and Evaluation (RT). 5. 1. 10.13130/2282-5398/7997.
Singh, V.K., Srichandan, S.S. & Lathabai, H.H. (2022). ResearchGate and Google Scholar: how much do they differ in publications, citations and different metrics and why? Scientometrics.127, 1515–1542. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-022-04264-2.
Valizadeh-Haghi, S., Nasibi-Sis, H., Shekofteh, M., & Rahmatizadeh, S. (2022). ResearchGate Metrics’ Behavior and Its Correlation with RG Score and Scopus Indicators. Information Technology and Libraries, 41(1). https://doi.org/10.6017/ital.v41i1.14033
Yu, M.C., Wu, Y.C. J., Alhalabi, W., Kao, H.-Y., & Wu, W.-H. (2016). ResearchGate: An effective altmetric indicator for active researchers?. Computers in Human Behavior, 55, Part B, 1001–1006.

  • Receive Date 14 February 2023
  • Revise Date 15 May 2023
  • Accept Date 19 August 2023