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Institutional and commercial web profiles that provide biobibliographic information about researchers are used for promotional purposes but also as information sources. In the latter case, the profiles' (re)presentations of researchers may be used to assess whether a researcher can be trusted. The article introduces a conceptual framework of how trust in researchers may be formed based on how the researchers' experiences and achievements are mobilized on the profiles to tell a multifaceted story of the “self.”

The framework is an analytical product which draws on theories of trust as well as on previous research focused on academic web profiles and on researchers' perceptions of trust and credibility. Two dimensions of trust are identified as central to the theoretical construction of trust, namely competence and trustworthiness.

The framework outlines features of profile content and narrative that may influence the assessment of the profile and of the researcher's competence and trustworthiness. The assessment is understood as shaped by the frames of interpretation available to a particular audience.

The framework addresses the lack of a trust perspective in previous research about academic web profiles. It provides an analysis of how potential trust in the researcher may be formed on the profiles. An innovative contribution is the acknowledgement of both qualitative and quantitative indicators of trustworthiness and competence, including the richness of the story told about the “self.”

The activities of academic researchers are increasingly regulated by neo-liberal ideals, including expectations that researchers are visible online and actively promote their output. The purpose of this paper is to explore how researchers take on this responsibility. It uses the concepts of genre, authorship and self-writing in order to understand how the story of an academic life is constructed on academic web profiles.

A qualitative content analysis was conducted of material on 64 profiles belonging to 20 researchers on institutional and personal websites, as well as on ResearchGate, Academica.edu and Google Scholar.

The study shows that while institutional websites primarily contain researcher-produced material, content on commercial platforms is often co-constructed through distributed authorship by the researcher, the platform and other platform users. Nine different ways in which the profile of an “academic self” may be said to highlight the particular strengths of a researcher are identified. These include both metrics-based strengths and qualitative forms of information about the academic life, such as experience, the importance of their research and good teaching.

This study of academic web profiles contributes to a better understanding of how researchers self-govern the story of their academic self, or resist such governance, in online environments.

The study furthers the knowledge of how researchers make use of and respond to digital tools for online visibility opportunities and how the story of the “academic self” is “made” for such public presentation.

This article provides insight into researchers' use of academic web profiles and an understanding of how the influencing factors highlighted in the literature interact with each other, affecting researchers' motivation to use web profiles.

Based on motivation theory and literature related to the use of online profile platforms and academic web profiles, the authors present a conceptual framework for motivation factors influencing researchers' use of academic web profiles. The authors use qualitative interviews with researchers to explore and enrich the conceptual framework.

The conceptual framework of researchers' motivation space shows the relationships and influences between internal and external motivation in connection to three main categories (Identity and professional goals, Organisation and guidelines, Platforms and technology) and 12 more specific aspects of motivation that all play a role in choices regarding academic online profiles and platforms. Personality also plays an important role in itself – and not always in support of professional goals or workplace guidelines.

The study shows that a holistic perspective is necessary to understand the high degree of complexity in terms of researchers' motivation to use academic online profiles, and the presented conceptual framework can be used to understand and activate motivation factors.

This paper aims to present and evaluate a web‐based tool, namely ASK‐CDM‐ECTS, which facilitates authoring and publishing on the web descriptions of (open) academic courses in machine‐readable format using an application profile of the Course Description Metadata (CDM) specification, namely CDM‐ECTS.

The paper examines existing open academic courses initiatives and presents a conceptual model for describing an academic course. Next, the elements of the conceptual model are mapped to the CDM specification, as well as to the CDM‐ECTS application profile for describing (open) academic courses with ECTS compatible information. Finally, the ASK‐CDM‐ECTS tool is presented, which allows authoring of (open) academic courses descriptions based on the proposed conceptual model and by following the CDM‐ECTS application profile.

Based on the evaluation results, it is evident that ASK‐CDM‐ECTS can clearly support the process of describing academic courses offered by European Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) with ECTS compatible information following the CDM‐ECTS application profile; and the process of searching and retrieving academic courses offered by European HEIs.

The evaluation scenarios were executed with users’ representatives from only one HEI. Future work intends to conduct further experiments involving users’ representatives from different HEIs for evaluating the proposed tool.

OpenCourseWare has become a social movement aiming to equal opportunities in education. This paper presents the ASK‐CDM‐ECTS tool, which can be exploited for setting‐up European Open Courses Initiatives that will facilitate open access to education and learning for the societies of the EU Member States.

Despite the development of the CDM specification for describing (open) academic courses, and of its application profile CDM‐ECTS, it appears that there exists no software tool that allows authoring and publishing on the web descriptions of (open) academic courses following CDM‐ECTS. Thus, in this paper, the authors address this issue by introducing the ASK‐CDM‐ECTS tool, aiming at describing (open) academic courses following the CDM‐ECTS application profile.

The purpose of this paper is to describe the benefits of integrating personalization within a library web site and presents methodology for achieving this goal within an academic setting.

The project documented in this study explores the use of student course enrollment data as the basis for creating a personalized library web site. Off-the-shelf, open source applications are used in conjunction with existing university data to deliver a final product that offers an enhanced user experience for the university community.

Adaptive personalization is increasingly commonplace on the web. Academic libraries have a unique source of existing data that offers the potential of adding personalization to the library web site. At present, the personalization of library online services remains largely unexplored. This project illustrates one relatively low-cost method to help libraries interested in creating personalized web sites.

This paper provides a guide for libraries interested in the implementation of personalization within their web sites.

The project described in this case study is highly unique within libraries. The paper outlines the feasibility and technical requirements associated with using course enrollment data to add personalized content to a library web site.

Google Scholar Citations (GSC) provides an institutional affiliation link which groups together authors who belong to the same institution. The purpose of this paper is to ascertain whether this feature is able to identify and normalize all the institutions entered by the authors, and whether it is able to assign all researchers to their own institution correctly.

Systematic queries to GSC’s internal search box were performed under two different forms (institution name and institutional e-mail web domain) in September 2015. The whole Spanish academic system (82 institutions) was used as a test. Additionally, specific searches to companies (Google) and world-class universities were performed to identify and classify potential errors in the functioning of the feature.

Although the affiliation tool works well for most institutions, it is unable to detect all existing institutions in the database, and it is not always able to create a unique standardized entry for each institution. Additionally, it also fails to group all the authors who belong to the same institution. A wide variety of errors have been identified and classified.

Even though the analyzed sample is good enough to empirically answer the research questions initially proposed, a more comprehensive study should be performed to calibrate the real volume of the errors.

The discovered affiliation link errors prevent institutions from being able to access the profiles of all their respective authors using the institutions lists offered by GSC. Additionally, it introduces a shortcoming in the navigation features of Google Scholar which may impair web user experience.

Some institutions (mainly universities) are under-represented in the affiliation feature provided by GSC. This fact might jeopardize the visibility of institutions as well as the use of this feature in bibliometric or webometric analyses.

This work proves inconsistencies in the affiliation feature provided by GSC. A whole national university system is systematically analyzed and several queries have been used to reveal errors in its functioning. The completeness of the errors identified and the empirical data examined are the most exhaustive to date regarding this topic. Finally, some recommendations about how to correctly fill in the affiliation data (both for authors and institutions) and how to improve this feature are provided as well.

This paper aims to analyse various aspects of an academic social network: the profile of users, the reasons for its use, its perceived benefits and the use of other social media for scholarly purposes.

The authors examined the profiles of the users of an academic social network. The users were affiliated with 12 universities. The following were recorded for each user: sex, the number of documents uploaded, the number of followers, and the number of people being followed. In addition, a survey was sent to the individuals who had an email address in their profile.

Half of the users of the social network were academics and a third were PhD students. Social sciences scholars accounted for nearly half of all users. Academics used the service to get in touch with other scholars, disseminate research results and follow other scholars. Other widely employed social media included citation indexes, document creation, edition and sharing tools and communication tools. Users complained about the lack of support for the utilisation of these tools.

The results are based on a single case study.

This study provides new insights on the impact of social media in academic contexts by analysing the user profiles and benefits of a social network service that is specifically targeted at the academic community.

The purpose of this paper is to detect and describe disciplinary differences in the users and use of several social networking sites by scientists.

Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (CSIC) (Spanish National Research Council) researchers registered in the most currently relevant academic social network sites (Google Scholar Citations, Academia.edu, ResearchGate (RG) and Mendeley) were analysed. In total, 6,132 profiles were classified according the eight research areas of the CSIC.

Results show that Academia.edu is massively populated by humanists and social scientists, while RG is popular among biologists. Disciplinary differences are observed across every platform. Thus, scientists from the humanities and social sciences and natural resources show a significant activity contacting other members. On the contrary, biologists are more passive using social tools.

This is the first study that analyses the disciplinary performance of a same sample of researchers on a varied number of academic social sites, comparing their numbers across web sites.

The purpose of this paper is to develop a cross‐language personalized recommendation model based on web log mining, which can recommend academic articles, in different languages, to users according to their demands.

The proposed model takes advantage of web log data archived in digital libraries and learns user profiles by means of integration analysis of a user's multiple online behaviors. Moreover, keyword translation was carried out to eliminate language dissimilarity between user and item profiles. Finally, article recommendation can be achieved using various existing algorithms.

The proposed model can recommend articles in different languages to users according to their demands, and the integration analysis of multiple online behaviors can help to better understand a user's interests.

This study has a significant implication for digital libraries in non‐English countries, since English is the most popular language in current academic articles and it is a very common phenomenon for users in these countries to obtain literatures presented by more than one language. Furthermore, this approach is also useful for other text‐based item recommendation systems.

A lot of research work has been done in the personalized recommendation area, but few works have discussed the recommendation problem under multiple linguistic circumstances. This paper deals with cross‐language recommendation and, moreover, the proposed model puts forward an integration analysis method based on multiple online behaviors to understand users' interests, which can provide references for other recommendation systems in the digital age.

The advent of Web 2.0 in libraries persuades the librarians to adopt new ways to communicate, determine, and satisfy the needs of the users. The paper aims to discuss this issue.

A 30-question questionnaire was given to 30 undergraduate medical students of Vardhman Mahavir Medical College and a 10-question questionnaire was given to the librarian, to find out: the marketing and promotional strategies employed by the library; determine the awareness and satisfaction level of the users; prepare library profile, customer profile and market profile; and perform SWOT analysis. User responses were coded and processed using GNU PSPP software.

From the library profile of Vardhman Mahavir Medical College library, it can be concluded that the library has the potential to offer better services and products to its users. From the customer profile of Vardhman Mahavir Medical College library, it is concluded that the most of its users are young male undergraduate students who use the library more on weekly basis. From the market profile of Vardhman Mahavir Medical College library, it is concluded that the library has not invested in the marketing and has no promotion strategy or marketing strategy for its products and services. Also, the library has only one digital promotional activity. From the SWOT analysis of Vardhman Mahavir Medical College library, it is concluded that the library does not use any of the social platforms to market its products and services. Most of the users are unaware of the services and products offered by the library. There are many opportunities for the library to work upon and improve the quality of products and services being offered to its users.

The major limitation of the present study is its small sample size. It is very difficult to conduct surveys in health libraries because of the busy schedule of the undergraduate medical students and their reluctance to fill out lengthy questionnaires. However, this small sample size only made it possible to conduct the SWOT analysis on the basis of the users’ survey successfully. Further, the small sample size helped to take into account all the opportunities stated by the users which would not have been possible if a larger sample size was taken.

This study is one of a kind which provides an overview of marketing research of an academic health library of New Delhi (India) with a special focus on library profile, market profile, customer profile and SWOT analysis. It addresses the gaps in the literature by studying marketing in the context of academic health libraries in the digital environment.