Social media and research: an assessment of the coverage of South African universities in ResearchGate, Web of Science and the Webometrics Ranking of World Universities

Omwoyo Bosire Onyancha

doi:10.7553/81-1-1540

Omwoyo Bosire Onyancha Chair of Department of Information Science, University of South Africa http://orcid.org/0000-0002-9232-4939

Keywords: South Africa, altmetrics, webometrics, citation analysis, social media, research, universities, research impact

Abstract

The emergence of social media, including social networking technologies, has had a profound impact on almost all human activities. Social media’s application in research is the most recent occurrence, as the technologies have gained prominence among researchers who regard social media as an avenue for not only strengthening their own networks, but also sharing their research. This article focuses on one of the social networking services for researchers, namely ResearchGate (RG), to assess the research visibility and impact of universities in South Africa. It also examines the correlation between the universities’ ResearchGate-based metrics and Web of Science (WoS) citation statistics on the one hand, and the Webometrics Ranking of World Universities’ (WRWU) ranking on the other. Results reveal that researchers in the top-ranking South African universities have quickly moved to embrace social media; there is a high correlation between RG and WoS in terms of their coverage of papers produced by universities in South Africa; there is also a high correlation between RG and WoS in terms of impact; and ranking of universities in RG, WoS and WRWU is similarly highly correlated. Further discussions, conclusions and recommendations are provided in the paper.

Downloads

Download data is not yet available.

Author Biography

Omwoyo Bosire Onyancha, Chair of Department of Information Science, University of South Africa

Omwoyo Bosire Onyancha holds a PhD degree from the University of Zululand, South Africa. He works as a Professor and Chair of Department, of Information Science, University of South Africa (UNISA). Prior to joining UNISA, he worked as the deputy librarian at the University of Eastern Africa – Baraton, Kenya. He has published widely in the focus field of informetrics. His research interests include:Informetrics/Scientometrics/Bibliometrics/WebometricsInformation Resource Management (IRM)Management of Information ServicesKnowledge management and organizationInformation Searching and Retrieval (ISR)

References

Allen, H.G., Stanton, T.R., Pietro, F. and Moseley, G.L. 2013. Social media release increases dissemination of original articles in the clinical pain sciences. PLOS One, 8(7): 1-6.

Bianchini, L. 2012. Social networks for scientists: what social media to use for your research activity. [Online]. https://www.mysciencework.com/news/6400/social-networks-for-scientists (24 July 2014).

Brody, T., Harnad, S. and Carr, L. 2006. Earlier web usage statistics as predictors of later citation impact. Journal of the American Society of Information Science & Technology, 57: 1060–1072.

Burke, F. 2013. Social media vs. social networking. [Online]. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/fauzia-burke/social-media-vs-social-ne_b_4017305.html (4 July 2014).

Cann, A. 2011. Social media: a guide for researchers. [Online]. http://www.rin.ac.uk/our-work/communicating-and-disseminating-research/social-media-guide-researchers (10 March 2014).

Carpenter, J., Wetheridge, L. and Tanner, S. 2012. Researchers of tomorrow: the research behaviour of Generation Y doctoral students. [Online]. http://www.jisc.ac.uk/media/documents/publications/reports/2012/Researchers-of-Tomorrow.pdf (12 July 2014).

Costas, R., Zahedi, Z. and Wouters, P. 2014. Do altmetrics correlate with citations? Extensive comparison of altmetric indicators with citations from a multidisciplinary perspective. [Online]. http://arxiv.org/pdf/1401.4321v1.pdf (7 May 2014).

Cybermetrics Lab. 2014a. Ranking web of universities: South Africa. [Online]. http://www.webometrics.info/en/Africa/South%20Africa (14 April 2014).

Cybermetrics Lab. 2014b. Ranking web of universities: methodology. [Online]. http://www.webometrics.info/en/Methodology (14 April 2014).

Dodaro, M. 2014. Social media statistics that will guide your strategy. [Online]. http://topdogsocialmedia.com/social-media-statistics-2014/ (3 March 2014).

Foley, C.J. 2008. An impossible dream? The efficacy of using rankings to improve the perception of a non-OECD1 country’s education system. College and University, 83(4): 24-32.

Harzing, A.W. 2010. Citation analysis across disciplines: the impact of different data sources and citation metrics. [Online]. http://www.harzing.com/data_metrics_comparison.htm (6 March 2015).

International Telecommunication Union. (2010). The rise of social networking: changing the web as we know it. [Online]. http://www.itu.int/net/itunews/issues/2010/06/35.aspx (16 July 2014).

Jung, B. 2014. The negative effect of social impact on society and individuals. [Online]. http://smallbusiness.chron.com/negative-effect-social-media-society-individuals-27617.html (14 August 2014).

Konkiel, S. 2012. Altmetrics: An App Review. [Online]. http://eprints.rclis.org/20008/1/Altmetrics%20an%20App%20Review%20-%20OCLC%20-%20skonkiel.pdf (12 June 2014).

Liebeskind, J.P., Oliver, A.L., Zucker, L. and Brewer, M. 1996. Social networks, learning, and flexibility: sourcing scientific knowledge in new biotechnology firms. Organization Science, 7(4): 428-443.

Luwel, M. 1999. Is the Science Citation Index US-biased? Scientometrics, 46(3): 549-562.

Matthews, A.P. 2012. South African universities in world rankings. Scientometrics, 92: 675-695.

Miah, A. 2013. Top five media platforms for research development. [Online]. http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2013/07/26/a-to-z-of-social-media-for-academia/ (16 August 2014).

Moed, H.F. 2005. Statistical relationships between downloads and citations at the level of individual documents within a single journal. Journal of the American Society of Information Science & Technology, 56: 1088–1097.

Mounce, R. 2013. Open access and altmetrics: distinct but complementary. Bulletin of the Association for Information Science and Technology, 39(4): 14-17.

Mulero, S.O. 2012. Acceptance and impact of social networks in marketing using extended technology acceptance model. [Online]. http://digitalknowledge.cput.ac.za/xmlui/handle/11189/263 (14 August 2014).

Nieder, C., Dalhaug, A. and Aandahl, G. 2013. Correlation between article download and citation figures for highly accessed articles from five open access oncology journals. SpringerPlus, 2: 261-265.

Nwagwu, W.E. 2010. Cyberneting the academe: centralized scholarly ranking and visibility of scholars in the developing world. Journal of Information Science, 36(2): 228-241.

O’Keeffe, G.S., Clarke-Pearson, K. and Council on Communications and Media. 2014. The impact of social media on children, adolescents and families. Pediatrics: Official Journal of the American Academy of Pediatrics. DOI:10.1542/peds.2011-0054.

O’Leary, D.E. 2008. The relationship between citations and number of downloads in decision support systems. Decision Support Systems, 45: 972–980.

Onyancha, O.B. 2008. Authorship patterns of the literature on HIV/AIDS in Eastern and Southern Africa: an exposition of the responsible authors, institutions and countries, 1980-2005. South African Journal of Libraries and Information Science, 74(1): 9-22

Parrack, D. 2012. The negative impact of social networking sites [opinion]. [Online]. http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/negative-impact-social-networking-sites-society-opinion/ (14 August 2014).

Pouris, A. and Pouris, A. 2011. Scientometrics of a pandemic: HIV/AIDS research in South Africa and the world. Scientometrics, 86: 541-552.

Republic of South Africa. Department of Higher Education and Training. 2014. Report on the evaluation of the 2012 universities’ research publication outputs. Pretoria: Department of Higher Education and Training. [Online]. http://www.ul.ac.za/research/application/downloads/Report%20of%202012%20Research%20Outputs%2004.03.14.pdf (2 April 2015).

Republic of South Africa. Department of Higher Education and Training. 2015. Report on the evaluation of the 2013 universities’ research publication outputs. Pretoria: Department of Higher Education and Training. [Online]. http://www.dhet.gov.za/Policy%20and%20Development%20Support/Report%20of%202013%20Research%20Outputs.pdf (2 April 2015).

ResearchGate.Net. 2015. RG score: a new way to measure scientific reputation. [Online]. https://www.researchgate.net/publicprofile.RGScoreFAQ.html (7 June 2014).

Rogers, S.S. 2015. How do scientists share on academic social networks like ResearchGate? [Online]. http://blog.sciencebite.com/how-do-scientists-share-on-academic-social-networks-like-researchgate/ (01 April 2015).

Rousseau, R. and Ye, F.Y. 2013. A multi-metric approach for research evaluation. Chinese Science Bulletin, 58(26): 3288-3290. DOI:10.1007/s11434-013-5939-3.

Thelwall, M. and Kousha, K. 2014. ResearchGate: disseminating, communicating, and measuring scholarship? Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology. DOI:10.1002/asi.23236.

Zahedi, Z., Costas, R. and Wouters, P. 2014. How well developed are altmetrics? A cross-disciplinary analysis of the presence of ‘alternative metrics’ in scientific publications. Scientometrics. DOI:10.1007/s11192-014-1264-0.