The role of ego in academic profile services: Comparing Google Scholar, ResearchGate, Mendeley, and ResearcherID | Co-creation in health | Scoop.it

Academic profiling services are a pervasive feature of scholarly life. Alberto Martín-MartínEnrique Orduna-Malea and Emilio Delgado López-Cózar discuss the advantages and disadvantages of major profile platforms and look at the role of ego in how these services are built and used. Scholars validate these services by using them and should be aware that the portraits shown in these platforms depend to a great extent on the characteristics of the “mirrors” themselves.

The model of scientific communication has recently undergone a major transformation: the shift from the “Gutenberg galaxy” to the “Web galaxy”. Following in the footsteps of this shift, we are now also witnessing a turning point in the way science is evaluated. The “Gutenberg paradigm” limited research products to the printed world (books, journals, conference proceedings…) published by scholarly publishers. This model for scientific dissemination has been challenged since the end of the twentieth century by a plethora of new communication channels that allow scientific information to be (self-)published, indexed, searched, located, read, and discussed entirely on the public Web, one more example of the network society we live in.