Social reference managers and their users: A survey of demographics and ideologies

PLOS ONE, Nov 2019

Altmetric indicators are increasingly present in the research landscape. Among this ecosystem of heterogeneous indicators, social reference managers have been proposed as indicators of broader use of scholarly work. However, little work has been done to understand the data underlying this indicator. The present work uses a large-scale survey to study the users of two prominent social reference managers—Mendeley and Zotero. The survey examines demographic characteristics, usage of the platforms, as well as attitudes towards key issues in scholarly communication, such as open access, peer review, privacy, and the reward system of science. Results show strong differences between platforms: Mendeley users are younger and more gender-balanced; Zotero users are more engaged in social media and more likely to come from the social sciences and humanities. Zotero users are more likely to use the platform’s search functions and to organize their libraries, while Mendeley users are more likely to take advantage of some of the discovery and networking features—such as browsing papers and groups and connecting with other users. We discuss the implications of using metrics derived from these platforms as impact indicators.

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Social reference managers and their users: A survey of demographics and ideologies

July Social reference managers and their users: A survey of demographics and ideologies Pei-Ying Chen 0 1 Erica Hayes 1 Vincent Larivière 1 Cassidy R. Sugimoto 1 0 Department of Information and Library Science, School of Informatics, Computing, and Engineering, Indiana University , Bloomington , Indiana, United States of America, 2 Carolina State University Libraries, Raleigh, North Carolina, United States of America, 3 EÂcole de biblioth eÂconomie et des sciences de l'information, Universit e de Montr eÂal , Montre al, Que bec , Canada , 4 Observatoire des sciences et des technologies (OST), Centre interuniversitaire de recherche sur la science et la technologie (CIRST), Universit e du Que bec à Montre al , Montre al, Qu eÂbec , Canada , 5 Department of Informatics, School of Informatics, Computing, and Engineering, Indiana University , Bloomington, Indiana , United States of America 1 Editor: Wolfgang Glanzel, KU Leuven , BELGIUM Altmetric indicators are increasingly present in the research landscape. Among this ecosystem of heterogeneous indicators, social reference managers have been proposed as indicators of broader use of scholarly work. However, little work has been done to understand the data underlying this indicator. The present work uses a large-scale survey to study the users of two prominent social reference managersÐMendeley and Zotero. The survey examines demographic characteristics, usage of the platforms, as well as attitudes towards key issues in scholarly communication, such as open access, peer review, privacy, and the reward system of science. Results show strong differences between platforms: Mendeley users are younger and more gender-balanced; Zotero users are more engaged in social media and more likely to come from the social sciences and humanities. Zotero users are more likely to use the platform's search functions and to organize their libraries, while Mendeley users are more likely to take advantage of some of the discovery and networking featuresÐsuch as browsing papers and groups and connecting with other users. We discuss the implications of using metrics derived from these platforms as impact indicators. - Data Availability Statement: The Mendeley/Zotero survey data files are publicly available at http://hdl. handle.net/2022/22043 from IUScholarWorks, an open access institutional repository service provided by the Indiana University Libraries for disseminating and preserving the intellectual output of Indiana University scholars. Funding: This work was supported by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Grant #G2014325 to VL and the Institute of Museum and Library Services Grant # RE0214002314 to CRS. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript. Introduction and background The scholarly communication system has been transformed over the past two decades by the digital age, Web 2.0 applications, and open scholarship initiatives. In recent years, social media platforms have significantly increased the online visibility of scholarly products: with more than 4.5 million researchers on ResearchGate and 11 million users on Academia.edu, there is considerable evidence of the increased usage of social media platforms for the creation, evaluation, and dissemination of scholarship [1]. In parallel, demands by research funders and administrators for indicators of societal impact [2±4] have generated wide interest among scholars in evaluating how social media data may be used as a means for measuring scholarly impact beyond the academy [5]. Citations have historically served as the dominant measurement for the impact of scholarly publications [6]. Citation counts, however, serve as indicators of papers' impact on other scholars, and are not indicative of their impact on the broader public [7]. New sets of metrics, grouped under the umbrella of ªaltmetricsº, propose new indicators of scholarly impact based on interactions on social media platforms [8]. Introduced in 2010 by Jason Priem and his colleagues, ªaltmetricsº claims to ªexpand our view of what impact looks likeº [8] by identifying online communities and tracking their online engagement with scholarly content [8,9]. Often considered as a subset of webometrics due to its reliance on open application program interface (API) usage data, altmetrics has sought to move beyond the traditional citation measurement of journal article by tracking online social media activities [ 10,11 ]. These activities include the appraisal of scholarly articles through the act of mentioning them online; using these articles to create new scholarly objects; or accessing, curating, and saving scholarly objects online [9]. There is wide variety in the tools that are used to perform each of these actions; however, one of the most commonly used online tools to access, save, and curate documents are social reference managers. Social reference managers were (...truncated)


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Pei-Ying Chen, Erica Hayes, Vincent Larivière, Cassidy R. Sugimoto. Social reference managers and their users: A survey of demographics and ideologies, PLOS ONE, 2018, Volume 13, Issue 7, DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0198033