Social Network Sites for Scientists

Social Network Sites for Scientists: A Quantitative Survey explores the newest social network sites (for example, ResearchGate and Academia.edu) and web bibliographic platforms (Mendeley, Zotero) that have recently emerged for the scholarly community to use in the interchange of information and documents. Chapters describe their main characteristics, what their advantages and limitations are, and the researchers that populate these websites. The surveys included in the book have been conducted following a quantitative approach, and measure the strength of the services provided by the sites in terms of use and activity. In addition, they also discuss the implications of new products in the future of scientific communication and their impact on research activities and evaluation. - Analyzes social network sites form scientists using a quantitative approach - Introduces the quantitative study of the main characteristic and functionalities of each platform, and the activity that they develop - Offers a scientific review of the most relevant and current studies on this issue, discussing their results and commenting on their implications for scientific communication and research evaluation

José Luis Ortega is a web researcher in the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC). He achieved a fellowship to the Cybermetrics Lab of the CSIC, where he finished his doctoral studies. In 2005, he was hired by the Virtual Knowledge Studio of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Sciences and Arts, and in 2008 he received a full position in the Vice-presidency for Scientific and Technological Research at the CSIC, working in research evaluation. He collaborates with the Cybermetrics Lab in research areas such as Webometrics, Web usage mining, Visualization of Information, Social network analysis and Web bibliometrics.