From sociability to creditability for academics

Highlights

• A strong correlation exists between the grants and RG scores at the college level.

• The relationship becomes insignificant for individual researchers.

• The AACSB-accredited group outperforms non-AACSB-accredited group.

Abstract

Social networking for academic exchanges, such as through sites like Researchgate.net, is gaining popularity among academics. This site offers many metrics (e.g. RG score and RG impact points) which have the potential to become universal research performance metrics. This paper presents an empirical survey of the top 150 researchers’ grants and their RG scores among 126 colleges of management in Taiwan. Our results show a strong correlation between the research grants and RG scores if the analysis is based on the college as a whole. However, the relationship becomes insignificant for individual researchers. In addition, colleges with the AACSB accreditation outperform AACSB member schools and non-member schools in terms of their research grants and sharing research outputs on ResearchGate. The authors conclude that metrics used on ResearchGate have the potential to become formal research performance evaluation tools. However, this time has not come yet, at least based on the experience of Taiwan.

Introduction

Advances in information technology have led to the rapid growth of a wide range of social media and social networking sites. Moreover, since the 1980s, there has been an increase in research on information-seeking behavior, and this has recognized the key role of informal communication in information acquisition and exchange (Case, 2002). The 1990s saw the start of initial research on the use of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) and their interactions with society (Kling, 2000, Kling et al., 2003, Sawyer and Eschenfelder, 2002). In this context, “Web 2.0 technologies” is the generic term for the recent generation of social media networking sites, such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, MySpace, ResearchGate and YouTube (McGee and Begg, 2008, O'Reilly, 2005; Cain, 2008). People adopt these services to carry out a broad range of activities, such as those related to music, marketing, travel, education, research, politics, social movements, and online learning (Ben Mahmoud, Azaiez, Bettahar, & Gargouri, 2016). By posting articles, clicking the “like” button, replying to enquiries, seeking people with similar interests, sharing articles, and so on, users come to form online social networks in order to raise their personal influence. Social Skills are critical for communicating and interacting with others effectively and these skills were considered part of daily life by scholars (Yu, Wu, Alhalabi, Kao, & Wu, 2016), youngsters (Wu et al., 2015, Zheng et al., 2016), firms (Wu, Shen, et al., 2015), and people with disabilities (Chin and Chang, 2010, Wang et al., 2011).

A major aim of many systematic reviews was to shed some light on the research patterns and historical development on a research topic for research scholars with an interest in that particular research domain (Chou and Chang, 2010, Wu et al., 2012). However, as in many other professions, scholars are now inclined to turn to using social media and social networking sites, and the versatile and interactive platforms they provide, to catch up new development more quickly, and to support their activities in a real time manner (CIBER, 2010, Gruzd et al., 2011, Procter et al., 2010). It is important for scholars to increase the visibility of their research output, and thus raise their citation count, and this can have personal benefits, beyond the contributions to the wider society. Along with Facebook, LinkedIn and YouTube, ResearchGate (http://www.researchgate.net/) is one of the most popular social networking platforms for academic exchanges. Many academics share their research outputs through this site and find peers with similar interests to exchange ideas with. Academic social networking sites with large user populations (e.g. ResearchGate) are perfect channels to enable research results to gain more recognition and extensive application.

In Taiwan, academic research achievements are mostly measured based on the quantity of papers published in SCI, SSCI, TSSCI and other formal channels, while academic social networking sites, which are of an informal nature, are rarely used to appraise the impact and visibility of research outputs. Tattersall (2015) also pointed out that the open peer review process may prevent academics from sharing their reviews and comments on others’ research, although this method also gives more opportunities for academics. ResearchGate is a social network site for academics to create their own profiles, list their publications and interact with each other. Like Academia.edu, it provides a new way for scholars to disseminate their publications, and hence potentially changes the dynamics of informal scholarly communication. In addition, a diversity of social networking sites has led to the rapid growth of their academic counterparts, with such sites becoming increasingly important with regard to the impact and visibility of academic work.

This research aims to explore how academics and the schools, where they serve, are related to ResearchGate, from the perspectives of Taiwanese academics' research outputs in relation to projects from the National Science Council (NSC), and their sharing of these via ResearchGate. AACSB membership and accreditation are what business schools strive for since they guarantee an institution's good academic reputation. Therefore, this study will also analyze whether there are differences among AACSB-accredited schools, AACSB member schools, and non-member schools in terms of their sharing research results via ResearchGate.