Abstract:

Academic social networks are forms of Internet service, which facilitate the management of relations among scientists, sharing resources for publications, and in some case data, research results and multimedia sources. The first social network SixDegrees.com, born in 1997, allowed users to create profiles as lists of their friends, but it was closed in 2000 due to the inability to convert it into sustainable business. If the personal Social Networks (Facebook, Twitter, Yahoo! Answers, Linkedin among many others) have become exponentially popular among lay people by sharing personal information, snapshots on private life, CV, or even for institutions and companies aimed at their web-marketing; turning to a scholars and researchers target, the academic social networks, born in 2008, have quickly become a fundamental tool to manage, read, share, annotate and cite research papers, among tens of millions of connected users. In the era of bibliometric culture, the academic social networks – moving from the first collaborative aim of global knowledge sharing and co-producing - have also become a tool for the author’s popularity. Therefore they have contributed to originate a new disciplinary field called Altermetrics (De Bellis, 2009, 2014), aimed at identifying new indicators for measuring their scientific impact.

In this research contribution we examine the role of Academic Social Networks in the dissemination of the Social Representations literature. In particular we take into account 9414 entries filed in the specialised SoReCom "AS de Rosa" @-library. Each entry was assessed concerning the presence of any item in the three academic social networks (Academia.edu, ResearchGate and Mendeley), coming so to compose a database of 2956 total entries; out of 9414 of selected articles in fact, 6458 were not found in none of the three academic social networks examined, while the remaining 2956 articles have been listed in at least one academic social networks. In particular, the presence of references related to social representations on the ResearchGate equaled 2657 items -almost 90% of the total-, coming to constitute ResearchGate as the most comprehensive among academic social networks analysed. The publications on social representations found in academic social networks have undergone some of the comparative analyses based on “big data” and “meta-data” filed in the SoReCom “A.S. de Rosa”@-library repositories, concerning authors’ countries and institutional affiliations, years of publication by year, type of publication, journal, language of publication, etc. This allows presenting the geo-mapping of the wider scientific production in Social Representations and comparative results with different types of publications. The trends concerning geo-cultural setting of authors who disseminate their publications via academic social networks resemble those of the social representations literature in general, with the prominent place of Europe (62.79%), Latin America (20.16%) seen as a fertilized field, followed by North America and the rest of the world, with the three top countries of France (17.49%), United Kingdom (15.46%) and Brazil (13.18%).

In conclusion, we can say that academic social networks constitute excellent allies in spreading knowledge and though still relatively modest use - at least in the field of Social Representations - is given to imagine what they will know in time as a progressive, comprehensive and very useful development.