Adoption of Virtual Academic Profiles for Knowledge Transfer in Research Communication

Technological development and the professional use of the Web have given new impetus to the communicative work of researchers, with direct benefits in terms of transferring and promoting knowledge, in particular scientific publications, and visibility for the author and his work. However, there is resistance and mistrust regarding their use, as well as a lack of knowledge about the most appropriate services. This research contributes to the study of the popularity and willingness of researchers to adopt digital academic services that allow the creation of a virtual profile, and its relationship with the web visibility obtained. Overlapping of 203 active profile accounts shows which and how many services are used by advertising and public relation researchers. The study represents the first exploration of the two scientific subfields and confirms ResearchGate and Google Scholar as the most popular services, as well as the existence of trends regarding their adoption in terms of scientific subfield and gender of researchers. The results reveal that the number of virtual profiles in digital scholarly services influences the web visibility of scientists in terms of researcher agent and their scientific production.