Preface

This tour among the social networking places for scientists has been an amazing voyage across an unexplored territory full of interesting revalations on the behaviour of the scholarly community in online collaborative environments. As an explorer scouting remote islands, through this survey I have been able to penetrate a complex world where academic relationships are projected and dissemination practices are reproduced. Thus, thanks to this exploration, it has been possible to detail what types of researchers are involved in these spaces, the way in which scholars are utilizing the functionalities of these services and what importance these spaces have for research activity and evaluation. This study has, for the first time, gathered together the most varied sample of social academic sites in order to represent the broad typology of services existing today addressed to making scientific contact. This has allowed me to extract precise information on their characteristics and functioning which has enabled specific indicators to be defined that facilitate easy comparison among them.

However, the most original and interesting aspect of this work is the employment of a quantitative approximation to the analysis of this world. Up to now, most of the studies faced with this reality have been focused on the opinion of scholars about the use of these platforms through a qualitative methodology (surveys, questionnaires, etc.). But this approach is limited to a small and subjective sample and only informs us of the tastes and preferences of the users. However, the quantitative approach brings an opportunity to complement this information, offering an objective view centred on the usage of these platforms and the behaviour of their users. But this systematic and quantitative approach can only can be carried out with the use of powerful crawlers and harvesters that extract and compile the information on each platform. This approach, originating in webometric studies, involves the extraction of huge volumes of information and the definition of indicators that permit the comparison and contextualization of each platform. From this point of view, this book presents novel and different results on the relationships of researchers with these platforms and the way in which these users collaborate among themselves.

The book begins with an introductory chapter in which social networking sites for scientists are put in the context of the Web 2.0 philosophy, the Open Access movement and the altmetrics phenomenon. In addition, this chapter describes the methods and instruments used to accomplish this study. Next, in the first of the chapters on analysis the structure and functioning of Nature Network and BiomedExperts is described, the first services that attempted to develop a social platform for scholars. However, these disappeared and the pioneering spaces are analysed to show how these first attempts at social networking sites were born from different conceptions. The next chapter reviews CiteULike and BibSonomy, the most representative of the social bookmarking services that illustrate the impact of folksonomy and social tagging in the development of the first social networking spaces. The following chapter analyses Mendeley and Zotero to get into the world of reference management tools and the huge possibilities they contain for bibliographic search. This chapter discusses how these services fit into the social networking world. ResearchGate and Academia.edu, dissected in the next chapter, are the most important examples of document sharing sites. These platforms could be considered the last stage in the evolution of social networking sites, revealing document sharing as the main interactive activity among researchers. The penultimate chapter is a comparative exercise that benchmarks the performance of each site in relation to the others, as a way to point out differences across types of services and detect the success and failure of each platform. Finally, a concluding chapter comments on the main results of this study and discusses their implications for academic activity in the Web.

However, this project would never have got off the ground without the inestimable technical support of the Cybermetric Lab, which put at my disposal a full array of computers working day and night crawling and harvesting information from every platform studied. Without this strong technical support, this quantitative analysis never would never have seen the light of day. I would also like to thank Isidro Aguillo whose insightful reviews and comments led me to improve the results and enhance the conclusions.