Information Discovery and Scholar Networking as Modes of Scholarly Communication: A Comparative Study

Abstract

This study sought to investigate information discovery and scholar networking as modes of scholarly communication across researchers in the Arab region. An online survey was distributed in December 2020 using the Google form. The questionnaire also includes the following elements: (a) what are the researchers’ purposes of using electronic resources; (b) how do researchers look for and access scholarly material and (c) what methods of networking are mostly used for scholar connection. The findings revealed no significant differences across the groups, even when it comes to gender and respondents’ discipline, it is clear that ResearchGate is the most popular among them all. Researchers holding degrees in Humanities and educational sciences like to use research platforms (M=4.37) more than social media (M=3.87). Moreover, the popularity of using Google Scholar and Google in the scholarly field are confirmed in line with previous evidences. There are highly significant differences across researchers regarding their behaviours in accessing scholarly material. Results suggest that respondents don’t consider researcher platforms like ResearchGate & Academia.edu as social media. It might be explained by the fact that research platforms like ResearchGate and Academia.edu are organized and designed for research purposes in a way that Facebook, Twitter, and Instgram are not