Academics are increasingly required to demonstrate their research activities, ideally via measurable performance indicators. At the Technical University of Munich (TUM), the university library has started a program to support university management and faculties as well as individual researchers in improving the visibility and impact of their research.
In August 2016, the Department of Architecture first approached us for advice on how to change its publishing culture to make it more open, international and competitive. The department struggles to provide evidence of their research output, which does not fit the classical system of scholarly communication. Architectural works come in a wide range of formats and their impact is hard to measure.
Following our usual course of action, we conducted a survey on profiles and performance indicators of TUM architecture professors regarding their scholarly output. Not surprisingly, a comprehensive analysis on Web of Science and Scopus confirmed that only a small number of the professorate are represented. However, we found various works on Google Scholar and individual lecturers use academic networking sites to present their work and projects.
This led us to the question: Do academic networking sites have the potential to fill the visibility gap for academics with a non-classical publishing culture such as architects and offer them an alternative route to provide evidence about their research activities?
Based on the QS ranking we analysed the representation of researchers from highly ranked universities on different academic networking sites to find out if there is a correlation between presence and excellence. In this paper, the results of the analysis will be presented and how they informed our consultation service for the department.
