An Exploratory Study of Scholarly Platforms and Features to Help Emerging Scholars Gain Visibility in the Scholars’ Community

Among available scholarly features on digitized scholarly platforms, certain features have high significance in assessing scholar's influence. If these features are identified, using them legitimately, emerging scholars can increase their influence and gain visibility in the scholars’ community. The purpose of this research is to identify and rank significant features on scholarly platforms. To select a data source, a comparative analysis of well-known scholarly platforms is performed. Based on the analysis, ResearchGate (RG) is selected. For RG, this research proposes a methodology to identify and rank significant scholarly features. The results demonstrate that for the rendered RG data, identified significant features in the order of their significance are number of citations, research items, followers, reads, recommendations, followings and projects. Significant features discovered in this research can be employed by various scholarly platforms to identify influential scholars. These scholars can be utilized in applications such as expert finding, influence ranking, recommendation systems, interdisciplinary collaborations etc. Moreover, the identified significant features will help scholars in focusing on certain aspects (features) to increase their influence legitimately.