STEM Librarians’ Presence on Academic Profile Websites

Abstract

This study explores STEM librarians’ presence on academic profile websites (APWs) at American and Canadian research universities. It was found that Google Scholar Citations was the most used APW, followed by ResearchGate, ORCiD, and academia.edu. The rate of profile without a publication list in ORCiD of these librarians was significantly lower than other users across this platform, suggesting that it may be necessary for ORCiD to improve the publication addition function in order to help other users to increase their presence. The social networking functions were not well adopted, as such, ResearchGate’s composite metric, RG Score, adds little new information to bibliometric indicators.