The Scientometrics and Reciprocality Underlying Co-Authorship Panels in Google Scholar Profiles
Ariel Alexi, Teddy Lazebnik, Ariel Rosenfeld
TL;DR
The study investigates why scholars curate their Google Scholar Co-authorship panels, focusing on scientometrics and reciprocality. It leverages a large dataset of roughly 120,000 profiles and analyzes six scientometric metrics for lifetime and last 5 years, using t-tests, a SciMed symbolic regression, chi-square tests, and a Random Forest classifier. Key findings show that higher lifetime scientometrics bias panel inclusion, but the effect weakens for scholars with higher own metrics, and reciprocality is prevalent with cross-discipline variation. A Random Forest model demonstrates strong predictive power for reciprocity, with mutual inclusion counts among the strongest predictors, revealing robust social dynamics in online scholarly profiles.
Abstract
Online academic profiles are used by scholars to reflect a desired image to their online audience. In Google Scholar, scholars can select a subset of co-authors for presentation in a central location on their profile using a social feature called the Co-authroship panel. In this work, we examine whether scientometrics and reciprocality can explain the observed selections. To this end, we scrape and thoroughly analyze a novel set of 120,000 Google Scholar profiles, ranging across four disciplines and various academic institutions. Our results suggest that scholars tend to favor co-authors with higher scientometrics over others for inclusion in their co-authorship panels. Interestingly, as one's own scientometrics are higher, the tendency to include co-authors with high scientometrics is diminishing. Furthermore, we find that reciprocality is central to explaining scholars' selections.