Abstract

The purpose of this study is to compare motivations for self-archiving across disciplines on an academic social networking site. We carried out an online survey with ResearchGate(RG) users, testing 18 motivational factors that we developed from a previous study (enjoyment, personal/professional gain, reputation, learning, self-efficacy, altruism, reciprocity, trust, community interest, social engagement, publicity, accessibility, self-archiving culture, influence of external actors, credibility, system stability, copyright concerns, additional time, and effort). We adapted Biglan's classification system of academic disciplines and compared motivations across different categories of discipline. First, we compared motivations across the four combined categories by the two dimensions - hard-pure, hard-applied, soft-pure, and soft-applied. We also performed a motivation comparison across each dimension between soft and hard disciplines and between pure and applied disciplines. We examined investigated statistical differences in motivations by demographic characteristics and RG usage of participants across categories as well. Findings showed that there were differences of motivations, such as enjoyment, accessibility, influence of external actors and additional time and effort, and personal/professional gains, for self-archiving across disciplines. For example, RG users in the hard-applied were more highly motivated by enjoyment than others; RG users in the soft-pure were more highly motivated by personal/professional gains than others. It is expected that findings could be used to develop strategies encouraging researchers in various disciplines contributing to share their data and publications in ASNSs.