How is an academic social site populated? A demographic study of Google Scholar Citations population
This paper intends to describe the population evolution of a scientific information web service during 20112012. Quarterly samples from December 2011 to December 2012 were extracted from Google Scholar Citations to analyse the number of members, distribution of their bibliometric indicators, positions, institutional and country affiliations and the labels to describe their scientific activity. Results show that most of the users are young researchers, with a starting scientific career and mainly from disciplines related to information sciences and technologies. Another important result is that this service is settled by waves emanating from specific institutions and countries. This work concludes that this academic social network presents some biases in the population distribution that does not make it representative of the real scientific population.
google scholar citations academic social networks web bibliometrics web demography