Who Shares Scholarly Output on Facebook? A Systematic Investigation into Their Location, Productivity and Identities

Facebook mentions to scholarly outputs are important data source for scholarly communication and altmetrics. However, little is known about who are producing these mentions. With statistical analysis of over 1.5 million records, this study has revealed scientific Facebook users’ geographic distribution and productivity distribution. Furthermore, via coding analysis based on random sampling strategy and stratified sampling strategy, their identities are recognised and classified in a systematic way. Results show the following. (1) Scientific Facebook users are widely distributed around the world but highly concentrated, presenting a different pattern compared with general Facebook users. (2) Productivity distribution is highly skewed towards the lowly productive scientific Facebook users. (3) Identities of scientific Facebook users are very diversified, and are proposed to be classified into 6 basic types and 30 specific types, verifying that various stakeholders other than scholars are engaged with scholarly outputs on Facebook. (4) Organisational scientific Facebook users (percentage > 80%) are dominant. Meanwhile, public users (percentage = 55%) have surpassed researcher users (percentage = 32%) as the major type. Among public users, various business organisations (percentage = 26%) and social organisations (percentage = 19%) are playing an important role. (5) Level of activeness has strong connection with users’ identities. There is clear increasing pattern regarding percentage of public users with decreasing level of activeness. These results indicate that Facebook mentions can measure interactions with scholarly outputs from much broader categories of users other than scholars and user’s context information needs to be considered when using Facebook mention counts for evaluative purpose.