Examination expertise sharing in academic social networks using graphs: the case of ResearchGate
Omar Alheyasat · Contemporary Engineering Sciences · 2015
ResearchGate (RG) has emerged as one of the first private social networks for researchers and developers. It adds many new features and activities to the normal Online Social Networks (OSNs). One of these services is the question/answer environment where users can share their queries and obtain answers. This service is considered very important for expertise sharing in RG. In this work, the question/answer platform of RG is studied. A web-crawler has been implemented in order to harvest the questions, authors' information and answers from RG. In this paper, the collected data has been utilized to generate a directed graph that connects users according to their questions and answers. The constructed graph is employed to extract some graph metrics, such as, node degree, centrality and connectivity. The results analysis shows that, users in RG do not care about sharing their expertise. In addition, it is observed that most of the nodes in the graph are disconnected, which means that, most of the questions have no answers. It is also observed that the number of triangles in the network graph is small which means that the network is not highly connected. Paper must have abstract.