Abstract

A survey conducted among 5,500 professors and researchers from the three Galician universities received 463 answers. The results reveal a rise in popularity of professional and scientific digital social networks, but it also shows a lack of knowledge about them and inefficient use of them. Ninety percent of Galician university professors are present in a professional or academic network, but only 8.64 percent consider themselves experts. LinkedIn and ResearchGate have the largest number of members, although their average use is medium or low. Biomedical, engineering, and natural sciences scholars use more networks than the two previously mentioned; and social sciences and humanities scholars prefer Academia.edu. In total, 32.8 percent of the three universities’ scholars that answered the survey use social networks at least once a month. Social networks are used primarily to disseminate and follow publications, and, secondly, to get citations and improve reputation.

Abstract

The expansion of social media forces the communication of science and scientific journals to adapt to this new environment. Previous studies and theoretical models such as Utaut and Utaut2 have proven that there is a relationship between the perception of future performance of technology (performance expectancy), the difficulty of use (effort expectancy) and the social influence to which the individual is subject, on the real use of technology, but there is still scarce research about the mechanisms that cause this effect. Starting with Utaut, the hypothesis is that there is an indirect conditional effect of the performance expectancy, the effort expectancy and social influence, over the actual use of social media in scientific journals, where the effect is driven through the intention of use and the size of the effect is moderated by gender and age. A survey was carried out on 300 editors of the top 20 in Social Sciences of the Google Scholar ranking. Confirming partially Utaut, the results of moderated mediation show that performance expectancy and social influence of editors affect the use of Facebook and Twitter, through the intention to use, but it is not the case of ResearchGate, Academia and LinkedIn. There is not enough evidence about the moderation of age and gender.