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User Participation in an Academic Social Networking Service: A Survey of Open Group Users on Mendeley

Wei Jeng, Daqing He, Jiepu Jiang

arXiv:1401.6495v3cs.SIphysics.soc-ph

TL;DR

Little is known about how scholars use ASNS social features and groups. This study surveyed Mendeley users about their activities and group-joining motivations, finding that they engaged less with social features than research features. It concludes that ASNS participation incentives remain insufficiently studied.

  • Problem

    Empirical studies provide little insight into scholars’ ASNS social-feature and group use, motivations for joining groups, and perceived benefits.

    Source: INTRODUCTION · p. 2, RELATED WORK · p. 3

  • Method

    The study examined Mendeley users’ practices and group-joining motivations through an online survey of 146 complete responses.

    Source: RESULT · p. 7, CONCLUSION · p. 13

  • Results

    Mendeley users were primarily academics, especially junior researchers, and did not explicitly engage in social activities such as group activities and making friends.

    Source: CONCLUSION · p. 13

  • Takeaways & Limitations

    ASNS users have different or multiple motivations for joining groups, but incentives for meeting those motivations remain insufficiently studied.

    Source: CONCLUSION · p. 14

    Further inquiry is needed into whether other scholarly practices meet these motivations, which social features academics prefer, and whether reluctance to engage socially is deep-rooted.

    Source: CONCLUSION · p. 14

Abstract

from arXiv · show

Although there are a number of social networking services that specifically target scholars, little has been published about the actual practices and the usage of these so-called academic social networking services (ASNSs). To fill this gap, we explore the populations of academics who engage in social activities using an ASNS; as an indicator of further engagement, we also determine their various motivations for joining a group in ASNSs. Using groups and their members in Mendeley as the platform for our case study, we obtained 146 participant responses from our online survey about users' common activities, usage habits, and motivations for joining groups. Our results show that 1) participants did not engage with social-based features as frequently and actively as they engaged with research-based features, and 2) users who joined more groups seemed to have a stronger motivation to increase their professional visibility and to contribute the research articles they had read to the group reading list. Our results generate interesting insights into Mendeley's user populations, their activities, and their motivations relative to the social features of Mendeley. We also argue that further design of ASNSs is needed to take greater account of disciplinary differences in scholarly communication and to establish incentive mechanisms for encouraging user participation.

INTRODUCTION

Scholars use academic social networking services (ASNSs) to build professional networks and support research, but little is known about their use of ASNS social features and groups. This study examines Mendeley group users’ activities and motivations through a cross-sectional survey.

INTRODUCTION

  • ASNSs are designed to help scholars build professional networks and facilitate research activities, addressing limitations of general social networking sites for professional connections.Scholars also use online research communities to share resources, exchange opinions, follow research, and build networks.Source: INTRODUCTION · p. 1
  • Empirical research has rarely examined ASNS social-feature use, leaving scholars’ group activities, usage, and perceived benefits poorly understood.The study focuses on these end-user practices to address the incomplete understanding of ASNS services for scholars.Source: INTRODUCTION · p. 2
  • The study investigates who uses open-group ASNSs, how often and in what ways they use them, and what motivates their use of social or research features.It focuses on scholars’ social activities and usage in an ASNS, using groups as the platform.Source: INTRODUCTION · p. 2
  • A cross-sectional survey used a 30-question questionnaire distributed to 97 Mendeley open groups.The authors chose Mendeley as one of the most popular ASNSs.Source: INTRODUCTION · p. 2
  • The study aims to clarify how Mendeley users interact with system features and inform ASNS research use, social-feature design, and participation incentives.The authors frame these aims as support for the further development of ASNSs.Source: INTRODUCTION · p. 2

RELATED WORK

Prior research on academic social networking services has emphasized metrics and site categories more than how scholars use group-based social features. This study addresses that gap in knowledge about group use, motivations, and perceived benefits.

RELATED WORK

  • Studies of scholars on general social networks examine support for academic activities and the challenges of separating personal and professional life; ASNSs emerged as another option.Some ASNSs began with social features, while Mendeley and Zotero emphasized research-oriented activities.Source: RELATED WORK · pp. 2–3
  • Online-community research identifies motivations including information, social contact, visibility, and altruistic benefits, which inform this study’s examination of group participation.Prior classifications also include material benefits, support, interaction, and self-identity.Source: RELATED WORK · p. 3
  • Much ASNS research examines altmetrics, whose measures have correlated with traditional publication indicators, while findings caution that social-media sources do not uniformly indicate scholarly impact.Thelwall et al. (2013) found evidence insufficient for several sites and no significant citation correlation for Google+ mentions.Source: RELATED WORK · p. 3
  • Prior ASNS work classified services by research-directory, awareness, management, and collaboration functions, and linked explicit group descriptions to membership and collection growth.Other work examined institutional presence and proposed group reading lists as virtual collections, whose usefulness required further examination.Source: RELATED WORK · p. 3
  • Research on ASNS groups is nearly absent, leaving limited understanding of scholars’ social-feature use, group motivations, and perceived benefits.The paper positions its study as a shift back to ASNS end users.Source: RELATED WORK · p. 3

RESEARCH SITE: MENDELEY

Mendeley combines research-management tools with social features such as profiles and groups. In groups, users can share and discuss academic resources, with different permissions for members and followers.

RESEARCH SITE: MENDELEY

  • Mendeley supports a digital research library, PDF annotation, article search, and citation management.The catalog contained over 300 million research papers as of December 2012.Source: RESEARCH SITE: MENDELEY · p. 4
  • Users can create professional profiles with research-oriented information, including publications, interests, advisees, awards, and grants.The example profile also includes affiliation and educational background.Source: RESEARCH SITE: MENDELEY · p. 4, Figure 1 · p. 4
  • Public groups are searchable, while owners can make membership fully open or subject to approval; private groups are visible only to members.Users can join fully open groups freely, but need owner approval for upon-approval groups.Source: RESEARCH SITE: MENDELEY · p. 4
  • Group members can contribute articles, while members and followers can like articles and comment on the group wall.Groups also include a publication list, member list, owner-written introduction, and interaction rules; Mendeley had nearly 77,000 public groups in May 2013.Source: RESEARCH SITE: MENDELEY · p. 4, Figure 2 · p. 5
  • The study identifies four potential reasons for joining groups: following trends, finding like-minded people, gaining professional presence, and sharing reading lists.These motivations frame the study’s examination of group participation.Source: RESEARCH SITE: MENDELEY · p. 5

METHODOLOGY

The study combined a survey of users in large Mendeley open groups with a background scan of public-group members. Its questionnaire captured user characteristics, usage habits, and motivations for joining groups.

Sampling and Piloting

  • A background study collected 54,703 members from 34,838 public groups and classified job titles from the 7,366 users with detailed profiles.Profiles were crawled for job titles, which were manually sorted into academic-position categories.Source: METHODOLOGY · p. 5
  • The survey targeted 97 open groups with more than 20 members, whose median size was 49, ranging from 20 to 284.The authors selected larger groups because they expected social activities to be more likely there.Source: METHODOLOGY · p. 6
  • After piloting with 13 doctoral students, the revised online questionnaire was posted to the groups from October to December 2012, with a follow-up message and no incentives.One author manually posted the survey link and follow-up.Source: METHODOLOGY · p. 6

Questionnaire Design

  • The final questionnaire contained 30 questions: one open-ended and 29 Likert-scale items covering demographics, Mendeley use, and group-joining motivations.The rating scale ranged from 1, the lowest degree, to 5, the highest; group IDs were embedded to monitor response rates.Source: METHODOLOGY · p. 6
  • The survey recorded discipline, position, gender, and age, and asked about account activity and six common Mendeley uses, from document management to socialization.Questions distinguished interacting with existing friends from connecting with new online contacts.Source: METHODOLOGY · p. 6
  • Group-joining motivations covered information seeking, networks and connections, professional visibility, and altruistic contribution to the reading list.The survey used three information-seeking questions, four network items, two visibility items, and one reading-list contribution item.Source: METHODOLOGY · pp. 6–7

RESULT

Among 146 respondents, Mendeley was used more for research than for social networking, while group-joining motives and activity patterns varied across users. The survey also found uneven disciplinary representation and cautioned that its open-group sample may limit generalizability.

User Population

  • The sample largely represented higher education and junior researchers, while Mendeley group participation varied by discipline and humanities-related fields were relatively scarce.Earlier Mendeley group users were concentrated in computer and information science and biomedicine, whereas more recent users were concentrated in social science, education, and psychology.Source: RESULT · pp. 7, 8, 12

Account Activities

  • Weekly account visits were common (53%), but 53% checked news feeds monthly and 57% updated profiles several times a year or less.Another 36% accessed their accounts at least monthly.Source: RESULT · p. 8, Table 3 · p. 8

Ways to Use Mendeley

  • Only 11% used Mendeley to manage academic friends and 9% to expand professional networks, while respondents primarily used it for document and citation management.Only 13% used profiles as an online portfolio or web CV.Source: RESULT · p. 8, Table 4 · p. 8

Group Use

  • 69% of respondents had joined 1–5 groups and 59% had followed 1–5, while most had never created a group.None had owned a private group (62%) or a public group (69%).Source: RESULT · p. 9, Table 5 · p. 9

Motivations for Joining Groups

  • Keeping up with their research domain and following community-attended topics were the top group-joining motives, while expanding or maintaining social networks drew less agreement.The motivation analysis included 130 respondents who had joined a Mendeley group.Source: RESULT · p. 9, Table 6 · p. 9
  • Information-seeking and altruistic motives had higher medians (4.00) than networking and visibility motives (3.50) for joining Mendeley groups.The figure summarizes the medians and distributions of the four motivation types.Source: RESULT · p. 9, Figure 3 · p. 9

Motivation Associations

  • Respondents who updated profiles monthly or checked feeds weekly reported stronger motivations, while joining six or more groups was associated with higher altruistic intentions but not networking intentions.Document and citation management use was not associated with group-joining motives; other preferred features were associated with all motivation types except altruism.Source: RESULT · pp. 10–11, Table 7 · p. 12

Limitations

  • Because the survey sampled open, large Mendeley groups rather than randomly selecting users, its participant and discipline distributions may not represent all ASNS users.The authors identify private and upon-approval groups as important settings for future study.Source: RESULT · p. 13

CONCLUSION

The study examines Mendeley users’ practices and motivations for joining ASNS groups, describing users as primarily academics—especially junior researchers—and finding limited explicit social activity. It identifies multiple motivations for open-group participation while noting that the incentives for meeting them remain insufficiently studied.

CONCLUSION

  • The study examined users’ practices and motivations for joining an online research group in Mendeley, which the authors describe as the first such ASNS study to their knowledge.Source: CONCLUSION · p. 13
  • Mendeley users were primarily academics, especially junior researchers, and did not explicitly engage in social activities such as group activities and making friends.The authors describe this analysis as using data provided directly by users themselves.Source: CONCLUSION · p. 13
  • Further inquiry is needed on whether existing scholarly practices meet these motivations, which social features academics prefer, and whether reluctance to socialize reflects scholars’ deep-rooted practices.Source: CONCLUSION · p. 14
  • ASNS users may have different or multiple motivations for creating or joining open groups, but incentives to meet those motivations have not been fully studied.Source: CONCLUSION · p. 14
  • Future work includes examining participation and interactions in ASNS groups, disciplinary distribution, preferred features and incentives, and librarians’ and information professionals’ roles.Source: CONCLUSION · p. 14

APPENDIX 2

Appendix 2 presents survey items covering respondent characteristics, Mendeley and group use, and motivations for joining groups. It also specifies the response scale and notes that secondary discipline was dropped from analysis.

APPENDIX 2

  • Respondent items covered main discipline, academic position, gender, and age or birth year; secondary discipline was dropped from analysis.Source: APPENDIX 2 · p. 18
  • Account-use items asked about access frequency, news-feed checks, profile updates, Mendeley tenure, and number of contacts.Source: APPENDIX 2 · p. 18
  • Common-use items covered document and citation management, paper searching, online portfolios, and academic contacts or connections.Source: APPENDIX 2 · p. 18
  • Group-use items covered group creation, membership and following, alongside engagement in group activities.Source: APPENDIX 2 · p. 18
  • Group-joining motivations included information seeking, networking, visibility, and altruistic contributions such as contributing to the reading list.Except for items B.1–B.4 and S.1–S.4, measured items used a 5-point Likert scale; an open-ended question allowed other answers.Source: APPENDIX 2 · p. 18
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