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Top1. Introduction
Academic social networking sites (SNSs) are growing rapidly. This growth is driven mainly by the continuous demand from academic people to exploit different aspects of the Internet. Similar to general-purpose SNSs, Academic SNSs offer several functionalities such as the management of profiles, posts, connections, and private messaging. However, in academic SNSs these features have more emphasis on academic metaphors. Several reasons motivate people to join academic SNSs, especially communicating peers and thus collaborating with them. Academic SNSs users vary on different levels, such as their academic position, discipline, country, experience, and motivation. This wide diversity is reflected on their behavior and usage patterns. It is obvious that studying users’ distribution and behavior is essential in providing a better understanding their needs and thus improving academic SNSs.
This paper aims to find whether different groups of academic users have behavioral patterns on academic SNSs (specifically on academia.edu). The significance of this study originates from the need for large scale studies about academic SNS; especially with different user classes/categories. Moreover, understanding academic users’ behavior and distribution is vital not only in improving existing systems for them, but also for designing new services and systems for their ease. To achieve this, we directly collected data of more than 30 thousand user profile from academia.edu website. We looked after users from four different academic disciplines, namely: Anthropology, Chemistry, Computer science, and Philosophy. We categorized our data set into four groups on basis of the academic position of each user: faculty members, graduate students, independent researchers, and post-doctoral researchers. After that, we analyzed our data set on basis of seven variables that we defined according to different elements of a user profile on academia.edu. Our analysis indicates that each of the four groups of users generally has a regular behavior regardless of the science discipline it originates from. However, there we found obvious behavior division in some aspects; especially in the behavior of independent researchers. Although these irregularities, independent researchers have distinct behavior pattern most of the time.
The rest of the paper is structured as follows: In Section 2, we give a discussion of related research in order to put this study in its context. Section 3 gives an overview of the academic social network site that we target in our study, namely: academia.edu. In Section 4, we present our research methodology in order to show processes, data, sampling, and variable definitions. Section 5 shows our main results followed by a discussion for our findings. Finally, we conclude with a set of findings and future work in Section 7.