Abstract:

Social networks play significant role not only in entertainment but also can improve the effectiveness of business and scientific processes. IT tools accelerate the knowledge dissemination, promote provided services or goods but also scientific achievements. At present researchers and scientists not only have to find interesting, up to date and significant topic of research, plan and perform the research in accordance with the methodology. They have to analyze and clearly visualize collected data and describe the final outcomes, prepare the scientific articles, but also effectively manage the research teams and widely promote the research and achievements. In today’s fast changing and digital world, single researcher is not able to perform the whole complex research process on global scale and in a short time. Also after performing the hard research work, the outcomes should by widely disseminated to promote the results, the author and the research organization. Research results have to reach a large, global audience, otherwise they could be not noticed or quickly forgotten. In this case very useful can be specialized social network sites like ResearchGate or Google Scholar. They integrate researchers with similar or supplementary interests, allow for building scientific portfolio by adding papers, research data, projects description. They can be also successfully used for improving communication, give the possibility of worldwide promotion of research outcomes and offer useful mechanisms for evaluation and comparison of educators, academics and research centers.
The aim of the article is to present and compare the usage of specialized social network platforms by MCSU business researchers. The author compares two popular platforms Google Scholar and ResearchGate. The article contains the characteristics of analyzed platforms, main profits and problems related to their usage and comparison of offered functionalities. The main part of the paper is the quantitative analysis of business researchers profiles on ResearchGate and Google Scholar. The data collected in April 2018 were used to answer the following research questions: If SNS platforms are widely used by the researchers?, What are the values of main metrics provided by both systems? and What are the differences between profiles created on explored platforms by various groups of users?
The literature research, analysis of services offered by the explored portals and performed quantitative analysis indicate that possessing SNS profile is not very popular among analyzed researchers. Metrics presented by Google Scholar are higher than available on ResearchGate. However, RG presents more metrics which allow for a more in-depth achievements analysis. The author experiences and opinions of active SNS users indicate that use of specialized social networks is easy and intuitive. The main initial barrier is manual profile creating. Many activities like metrics calculation, development of the publication list are performed automatically without the extra effort of the researchers. Therefore, it is worth to create the profile in social network sites for researchers to be more recognizable and boost the development of scientific career.

Keywords:

Social network, specialized social network, SNS, ResearchGate, Google Scholar, business scientist, comparative analysis, WEB 2.0, research evaluation, reputation.