Assessing Q&A Trends in Scholarly Communications: a Quantitative Study of ResearchGate

The purpose of the study is to explore and analyse the disciplinary question and answer (Q&A) trends prevailing in the scientific social network (SCN)/scientific collaborative network (SCN) also known as an academic social network (ASN), ResearchGate (RG) and to examine the subject wise status of Q&A, content sharing trends of Q & A on RG and statistical analysis of various tests. The present study adopted a quantitative research design (Correlational as well as explanatory) to pursue the research questions and objectives for conducting the study. The data was collected from the research gate (RG) platform and 35 subjects were selected from the subject area and seven different types of variables were selected from each subject i.e., Posts, Questions, Publications, Articles, Preprints, Conference paper, Literature review. Various tests viz, Descriptive statistics, t-test, normality test and correlation, JASP software were performed for analysis of the data. The findings of the study reveal Findings of the study reveals the subject-wise status in different variables such as Statistics has the maximum number (4575) and Genealogy has the minimum number of posts (48) and so on. On the basis of the total content of the subject areas, the Literature review is (1%) followed by Preprints (5%), Questions (6%), Conference paper (7%), Posts (16%), Articles (65%). Publications possess maximum value while measuring central tendency (mean & median) & dispersion (std. deviation & std. error) and those are the minimum in the case of Literature Review. Publications, Preprints & Conference paper shows normal distribution (p>0.05) with low p-value, and the data-set for other four variables don’t possess a normal distribution (p<0.05). The statistics of the Student's t-test shows a maximum value in the case of ‘articles’ (viz. 50.19) and the ‘p’ value of all the variables taken to be <0.001 except literature review (i.e., 0.005). Among the 21 correlation types, 7 possess negative correlation value suggests the presence of no correlation between those variables. Whereas, the other 14 possess a positive correlation value ranges from 0.013 to 0.906 depending upon respective p-values.