Profiling Use of Third-Party Research Repository Services

f third-party repository services? In a recent post I explained Why I’m Evaluating ResearchGate . In the post I summarised the reasons why I felt that researchgate.net could provide an additional service for depositing research papers which would complement Opus , the University of Bath institutional repository.

But what others services might also be relevant? And which services are hosting the largest numbers of research papers? In order to seek answers to these questions, I used Google to provide a measure of the size of a number of hosting services for PDFs and the number of PDFs they host. The services I analysed were: Researchgate.net : This site is described in Wikipedia as “ a social networking site for scientists and researchers to share papers, ask and answer questions, and find collaborators.

The site has been described as a mash-up of “Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn” that includes “profile pages, comments, groups, job listings, and ‘like’ and ‘follow’ buttons”. Members are encouraged to share raw data and failed experiment results as well as successes, in order to avoid repeating their peers’ scientific research mistakes. “ Academia.edu : This site is described in Wikipedia as “ a platform for academics to share research papers.

It was launched in September 2008. Currently the site is approaching 2 million registered users. [2] The platform can be used to share papers, monitor their impact, and follow the research in a particular field. “ Mendeley.com : Thus site is described in Wikipedia as “ a desktop and web program for managing and sharing research papers, [2] discovering research data and collaborating online.

It combines Mendeley Desktop, a PDF and reference management application (available for Windows, Mac and Linux) with Mendeley Web, an online social network for researchers. [3] [4] [5] Mendeley requires the user to store all basic citation data on its servers – storing copies of documents is at the user’s discretion “. Citeulike.org : This site is described in Wikipedia as “ based on the principle of social bookmarking [the service] is aimed to promote and to develop the sharing of scientific references amongst researchers .

In the same way that it is possible to catalog web pages (with Furl and del.icio.us ) or photographs (with Flickr ), scientists can share information on academic papers with specific tools (like CiteULike) developed for that purpose “. Scribd.com : This site is described in Wikipedia as “ a document-sharing website that allows users to post documents of various formats, and embed them into a web page using its iPaper format “. Many researchers will probably be familiar with the first four services listed.

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The fifth service, scribd.com, is included in order to explore whether a general-purpose PDF repository service could have a role to play in supporting the sharing of research publications. Findings for the Coverage of the Services Google was used in order to provide an estimate of the coverage of the services, including the total number of resources which have been indexed by Google and the number of PDF files.

The findings are given in the following table. Note that the figures were initially collected on 6 February 2013. In order to check the volatility of the findings the searches were repeated on 11 February. Search for Search Term Nos. of results Date Service: researchgate.net Total number of resources site:researchgate.net 55,300,000 6 Feb 2013 56,100,000 11 Feb 2013 Total number of PDF files site:researchgate.net filetype:pdf 2,980,000 6 Feb 2013 2,910,000 11 Feb 2013 Service: academia.edu Total number of resources site:academia.edu 12,500,000 6 Feb 2013 12,400,000 11 Feb 2013 Total number of PDF files site:academia.edu filetype:pdf 4,930 6 Feb 2013 4,740 11 Feb 2013 Service: mendeley.com Total number of resources site:mendeley.com 3,310,000 6 Feb 2013 3,150,000 11 Feb 2013 Total number of PDF files site:mendeley.com filetype:pdf 3,840 6 Feb 2013 4,020 11 Feb 2013 Service: citeulike.org Total number of resources site:citeulike.org 35,600,000 6 Feb 2013 35,700,000 11 Feb 2013 Total number of PDF files site:citeulike.org filetype:pdf 244 6 Feb 2013 30 11 Feb 2013 Service: scribd.com Total number of resources site:scribd.com 61,300,000 6 Feb 2013 166,000,000 11 Feb 2013 Total number of PDF files site:scribd.com filetype:pdf – 6 Feb 2013 371,000,000 11 Feb 2013 Service: issuu.com Total number of resources site:issuu.com 10,300,000 6 Feb 2013 26,100,000 11 Feb 2013 Total number of PDF files site:issuu.com filetype:pdf 48,800 6 Feb 2013 48,800 11 Feb 2013 It seems that Scribd hosts a very large number of resources (although a finding of 3 PDF resources originally found was discarded as the results seemed to be unreliable).

However since Scribd is a general purpose repository service, it was felt that ResearchGate provides a repository of a large number of PDFs resources which are more relevant for researchers. In light of this confirmation of the popularity of Researchgate an additional survey was carried out which reported on use of the service across Russell Group universities. Findings for Institutional Use of Academic.edu and Researchgate On 1 August 2012 a Survey of Use of Researcher Profiling Services Across the 24 Russell Group Universities was published on this blog.

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This survey has been repeated in order to detect changes in the use of ResearchGate. Since the original survey also provided an analysis of Academia.edu, this was also included in the current survey. The results are given in the following table.

Note that the data is also available in Google Spreadsheets. Ref. No. Institution Academia.edu (members) ResearchGate Aug 2012 Feb 2013 Members Publications Aug 2012 Feb 2013 * Members Publications 1 University of Birmingham 1,210 1,562 782 19,515 1,439 22,068 2 University of Bristol 1,018 1,189 641 21,249 1,251 23,701 3 University of Cambridge 3,020 3,439 972 39,713 1,699 42,419 4 Cardiff University 906 1,071 646 9,596 1,272 10,696 5 Durham University 1,001 1,189 273 1,151 662 7,152 6 University of Exeter 919 1,106 269 5,150 652 6,191 7 University of Edinburgh 2,079 2,479 1,181 25,918 2,065 28,486 8 University of Glasgow 1,004 1,212 613 20,041 1,224 21,733 9 Imperial College 798 896 1,096 30,404 1,377 34,202 10 King’s College London 1,420 1,748 1,406 18,264 2,241 23,391 11 University of Leeds 1,657 1,871 848 16,944 1,455 19,560 12 University of Liverpool 866 989 582 16,475 1,146 18,749 13 London School of Economics 1,131 1,354 191 1,838 407 2,449 14 University of Manchester 2,279 2,590 1,113 25,139 2,188 29,675 15 Newcastle University 906 1,039 704 17,307 1,348 17,376 16 University of Nottingham 1,299 1,529 970 20,513 1,559 20,145 17 University of Oxford 3,842 4,469 1,221 38,224 1,967 39,861 18 Queen Mary 715 849 228 5,232 898 6,013 19 Queen’s University Belfast 689 774 479 10,750 864 11,699 20 University of Sheffield 1,082 1,235 823 18,127 1,659 20,149 21 University of Southampton 1,083 1,265 670 16,887 1,371 18,325 22 University College London 2,776 3,162 1,624 35,035 2,878 38,550 23 University of Warwick 1,143 1,349 448 8,098 873 9,334 24 University of York 986 1,180 386 4,841 696 5,179 TOTAL 33,829 39,546 18,166 426,414 33,191 477,103 Increase (%) 14.5% 82.7% 11.9% Note : * As described in the previous survey the numbers of Academia.edu

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