Abstract:

In digital and connected 21st century social media are used not only for entertainment but also for establishing professional networks, building the scientific portfolio and exchanging information with the experts all over the world. That kind of tools are frequently provided in a form of internet-based services (SaaS) and integrate people with similar background, interests or professional career. People use them because they offer a lot of benefits like quick interactions, digital portfolio development, fast evaluation of achievements. The ResearchGate (RG) is one of the popular social networking portal for researchers, scientists and academics. It allows for publishing scientific portfolios, establishing new professional networks (project groups), exchanging ideas and results of research but also comparing the achievements of academics and creating many useful rankings, therefore scientists should use it, but it can also be the subject of scientific research.

The aim of the article is to present the ResearchGate portal and check if this tool is more frequently used by academics from the best Polish business schools and universities than scientists employed in middle class and less prestigious high schools. The paper contains characteristics of Research Gate - social media platform for scientists, stresses the advantages and disadvantages of using that kind of tools. In the main part of the paper the authors present the results of analysis of ResearchGate profiles owned by Polish academics, interested in management and economics.

The data of 372 academics were checked on ResearchGate and analyzed at the beginning of 2018. Authors checked both assistants, lecturers and professors from the best, middle and the least prestigious Polish public business schools or departments (according to Polish high school ranks). The quantitative ResearchGate metrics: RG Score, research items, reads, citations and followers were compared, The SPSS tool was used to perform calculations: descriptive statistics, t-Student test and correlation coefficients. The performed comparative analysis allow to conclude that ResearchGate is more frequently used by young scientists before Ph. D. or young doctors. The best universities don’t have a significantly higher percentage of RG users than less prestigious high schools, however we can observe significant differences in the main RG metrics. The highest average RG Score values are owned by professors employed at the universities that occupy the top positions in the rankings. They have also the biggest number of publications and citations. From the analysis of RG profiles owned by Polish academics interested in economics and management we can conclude that from the university perspective not the quantity of profiles counts but their quality and that the quality of profile is based mostly on the quality of publications and the profile owner's activity on the portal.

Keywords:

Specialized social network, SNS, ASNS, ResearchGate, RG Score, quantitative analysis, comparative analysis, Polish universities, business department.