The Visibility of Authority Records, Researcher Identifiers, Academic Social Networking Profiles, and Related Faculty Publications in Search Engine Results

Abstract

Information about faculty and their publications can be found in library databases such as the Library of Congress Name Authority File, VIAF, WorldCat, and institutional repositories; in identifier registries such as ORCID and ISNI; and on academic social networking sites such as Academia, Google Scholar, and ResearchGate, but the way search engines use such identifiers and profiles is unclear. Therefore, researchers at a large comprehensive university conducted several rounds of web searching before and after the creation and modification of faculty authority records. The sample consisted of 24 faculty and the 35 publications associated with their authorities. The researchers searched for the faculty and their publications on the social networking and identity websites directly, and then used Google, Bing, and Google Scholar to record which of the faculty members’ profiles and publications were found within the top 50 results. Faculty with more profiles were more visible in search engine results, and faculty with authority records ranked more highly in Google. Results related to publication discovery and ranking were more inconclusive, but revealed clear differences between search tools. The implications of this exploratory research can support educational efforts about academic identities and scholarly profiles, begin a research agenda, and inform methodological development surrounding the influence of identity records and academic social networking profiles on web visibility.

Keywords:

• academic identities
• authority records
• discoverability
• identity management
• scholarly profiles
• search engine indexing
• search engine optimization
• social media

Author bios

Rebecca B. French is the Metadata Analyst Librarian at James Madison University, where she provides metadata expertise and programming support for metadata workflows. She was previously a music cataloger at JMU and at Indiana University's William and Gayle Cook Music Library.

Jody Condit Fagan is co-director of James Madison University Libraries' Technology Department. Their background includes public services, technical services, library technologies, and project management. Their research interests have recently focused on the visibility of the humanities in public search engines, leadership, perceptions of librarians, and academic identities.

Notes

1 ORCID guidelines state that it is not an academic social network and ask that the phrase “ORCID record” be used instead of “profile” to refer to an ORCID account containing information about an individual (ORCID, 2018a).

2 Note: ORCID no longer provides this functionality.

3 Dates of searches on scholarly identity websites were Round 0: 7/24/17; Round 1: 10/11/17 – 11/8/17; Round 2: 1/9/18 – 2/20/18.

4 Dates of Google and Bing searches were Round 1: 11/13/17 (before NARs were updated/created); Round 2: 2/1/18 – 2/6/18 (after NARs were updated/created).

5 While we recorded the number of hits found in the first 50 results, we did not end up using this data (see Methodological Development).

6 Dates of publication searches in Google and Google Scholar were Round 0: 7/25/17 – 7/27/17; Round 1: 11/13/17 – 12/1/17; Round 2: 1/9/18 – 1/30/18.

7 Martín-Martín et al.’s (2014) large-scale, longitudinal study of highly cited articles 1950–2013 found 40% of them to be public full text, while Jamali and Nabavi (2015) found 61% of articles in their 2004–2014 sample to be public full text.