Users' distribution and behavior in academic social networking sites

Abstract

Academic social networking sites (SNSs) are growing rapidly. Worldwide, academicians use academic SNSs for many reasons regardless of their nation, gender, position, and discipline. In this paper, the authors extend their previous work in exploring the distribution and behavior of a particular academic SNS (academia.edu) on a large scale. The authors classify users into different groups based on their position, discipline, and continent. This study gives a better understanding of usage patterns in academic SNS, especially in the lack of large-scale studies about different classes of users on academic SNSs.