Investigating online social media users’ behaviors for social commerce recommendations

Online social media create virtual communities and network platforms that people use to create, share, and exchange opinions, views and experiences. With social networks, social commerce not only relies on commerce, but online social media can also promote the sale of goods or services online. Many online operators have begun to use recommendation systems to analyze customer purchase history and identify individual products that customers may purchase. This enables the company to send product information to consumers to attract their attention. In addition, consumers have a higher purchase rate for recommended products based on consumer data. Based on a survey in Taiwan society, this study uses the questionnaire survey method to collect data on a relational database. This study investigates Taiwan online social media users’ behaviors using data mining methods, including clustering analysis and association rules. Clustering analysis is to investigate possible profiles of users and association rules are to find knowledge patterns and rules of user profiles, online social media usage motivation/preferences and social commerce behavior in order to generate social commerce recommendations in terms of social technology development in the modern society.     

Does presence of social media plugins in a journal website result in higher social media attention of its research publications?

Scientometrics - Social media platforms have now emerged as an important medium for wider dissemination of research articles; with authors, readers and publishers creating different kinds of social...     

Is China also becoming a giant in social sciences?

At present China is challenging the leading sciento-economic powers and evolving to one of the world’s largest potentials in science and technology. Jointly with other emerging economies, China has already changed the balance of power among the formerly leading nations as measured by scientific production. In the present paper, the evolution of China’s publication activity and citation impact in the social sciences is studied for the period 1997–2006. Besides the comparative analysis of trends in publication and citation patterns and of national publication profiles, an attempt is made to interpret the results in both the regional and global context.     

Do highly cited researchers successfully use the social web?

Academics can now use the web and the social websites to disseminate scholarly information in a variety of different ways. Although some scholars have taken advantage of these new online opportunities, it is not clear how widespread their uptake is or how much impact they can have. This study assesses the extent to which successful scientists have social web presences, focusing on one influential group: highly cited researchers working at European institutions. It also assesses the impact of these presences. We manually and systematically identified if the European highly cited researchers had profiles in Google Scholar, Microsoft Academic Search, Mendeley, Academia and LinkedIn or any content in SlideShare. We then used URL mentions and altmetric indicators to assess the impact of the web presences found. Although most of the scientists had an institutional website of some kind, few had created a profile in any social website investigated, and LinkedIn—the only non-academic site in the list—was the most popular. Scientists having one kind of social web profile were more likely to have another in many cases, especially in the life sciences and engineering. In most cases it was possible to estimate the relative impact of the profiles using a readily available statistic and there were disciplinary differences in the impact of the different kinds of profiles. Most social web profiles had some evidence of uptake, if not impact; nevertheless, the value of the indicators used is unclear.     

News or social media? Socio-economic divide of mobile service consumption

Reliable and timely information on socio-economic status and divides is critical to social and economic research and policing. Novel data sources from mobile communication platforms have enabled new cost-effective approaches and models to investigate social disparity, but their lack of interpretability, accuracy or scale has limited their relevance to date. We investigate the divide in digital mobile service usage with a large dataset of 3.7 billion time-stamped and geo-referenced mobile traffic records in a major European country, and find profound geographical unevenness in mobile service usage—especially on news, e-mail, social media consumption and audio/video streaming. We relate such diversity with income, educational attainment and inequality, and reveal how low-income or low-education areas are more likely to engage in video streaming or social media and less in news consumption, information searching, e-mail or audio streaming. The digital usage gap is so large that we can accurately infer the socio-economic status of a small area or even its Gini coefficient only from aggregated data traffic. Our results make the case for an inexpensive, privacy-preserving, real-time and scalable way to understand the digital usage divide and, in turn, poverty, unemployment or economic growth in our societies through mobile phone data.     

The role of the social sciences in East–West relations

This paper explores the foundations of the current system of East–West scholarly exchanges in the social sciences, beginning with the Congress for Cultural Freedom in 1950. It traces the development of the social sciences in post-war Europe to philosophical differences between Polanyi and Bernal concerning long-term planning in science. This article argues that the development of the social sciences played a part in changing attitudes and tactics of war and in establishing channels of communication between East and West.     

Scientists’ perceptions of the social and political implications of their research

We explore an empirical approach to studying the social and political implications of science by gathering scientists’ perceptions of the social impacts of their research. It was found that 78 percent of surveyed scientists from a variety of fields responding to a survey indicated that the research performed in connection with a recent highly cited paper had such implications. Health related implications were the most common, but other types of implications encountered were technological spin-offs, public understanding, economic and policy benefits. Surprisingly many scientists considered the advancement of science itself to be a social implication of their research. The relations of these implications to the field and topics of research are examined, and a mapping of implications gives an overview of the major dimensions of the social impacts of science.     

What makes an article influential? Predicting impact in social and personality psychology

Factors contributing to citation impact in social-personality psychology were examined in a bibliometric study of articles published in the field’s three major journals. Impact was operationalized as citations accrued over 10 years by 308 articles published in 1996, and predictors were assessed using multiple databases and trained coders. Predictors included author characteristics (i.e., number, gender, nationality, eminence), institutional factors (i.e., university prestige, journal prestige, grant support), features of article organization (i.e., title characteristics, number of studies, figures and tables, number and recency of references), and research approach (i.e., topic area, methodology). Multivariate analyses demonstrated several strong predictors of impact, including first author eminence, having a more senior later author, journal prestige, article length, and number and recency of references. Many other variables — e.g., author gender and nationality, collaboration, university prestige, grant support, title catchiness, number of studies, experimental vs. correlational methodology, topic area — did not predict impact.     

Twitter data analytical methodology development for prediction of start-up firms’ social media marketing level

Social media marketing is an essential and important tool for start-up firms, which can help start-up firms remedy the marketing limitations through ease and relatively low costs. Predicting start-up firms’ social media engagement level can allow them to gauge the effectiveness of their social media marketing efforts and can provide numerous benefits related to strategic marketing processes. This study focuses on developing a methodology involving data science processes and machine learning models to account for the ongoing advancement of business intelligence methodologies. This study gathered data of 8,434 start-up firms from Twitter, generated social media-based features, and created machine learning models to predict the social media engagement level of each firm. The results show that deep learning provides the best accuracy in predicting the engagement levels. The results also show that the number of tweets by the firms, the number of retweets received, and the number of likes received have the most significance in determining the effectiveness of social media marketing activities.     

Publication behaviour and international impact: Scandinavian clinical and social medicine, 1988–96

The paper presents the results of an empirical study of the Danish and Nordic Publication behaviour and international impact in Clinical and Social Medicine covering the period 1988–96. As indicators are applied the international visibility of Scandinavian research output, the publication activity per capita in SCI journals, the development over time of the national citation impact in an OECD and World context, and the ratio of cited papers relative to the World. Compared toMay's analysis (1997), covering 1981–94, the analysis shows that a certain reshuffle of national positions among the OECD countries in citation impact has occurred. UK and New Zealand as well as Denmark and Sweden have lost in ranking to Finland and Belgium, both countries coming up from behind. The most interesting results concern the opposite research policy strategies displayed by Finland and Denmark which result in similar impact patterns relative to the World impact. The implications are discussed.     

Risk as social process: the end of 'the age of appealing to the facts'?

This paper utilises the notion of the risk society to argue that the ways in which technical practices, knowledge and rationality have become structured into governance are counter-productive and now instrumental to the proliferation of risk and destabilisation of governance. This problem is epitomised by how decisions have evolved to become a matter determined by 'facts' rather than by a determination of the community impact of outcomes and further compounded by the institutionally embedded blindness to wider social concerns that this entails. It is argued that what are required are processes integrating 'factual' technical and 'value-laden' societal concerns and avenues for this and their ramifications are elaborated and explored. Central to such developments will be a democratisation of technical practices and the institutions in which they are embedded. The broader political implications of these developments are examined and found to involve a radical extension of democracy involving an extensive reshaping of the topography of governance.     

A mediated model on the adoption of social media and SMEs’ performance in developing countries

PurposeSmall and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) can adopt and use social media (SM) for communicating information with stakeholders with minimal cost. The ability to access and share information influences the SMEs' performance, but there is little scholarship on the association between the adoption of social media and SMEs' performance. This research aims to investigate the effects of technology-organizational-environmental (TOE) factors on the adoption of SM and SMEs’ performance in developing countries.Design/methodology/approachThis study employed the TOE framework as determinants affecting the adoption of social media and SMEs' performance. The paper used a closed-ended questionnaire to gather data, through an online survey, from randomly selected respondents from SMEs operating in Pakistan. Partial-least-squares-structural-equation-modeling (PLS-SEM) was used for the path analysis of 423 responses from SMEs' owners, executives, and managers. The present study also explores the mediating role of SM between TOE characteristics and SMEs’ performance.FindingsThe findings revealed a direct positive relationship between TOE constructs, the adoption of SM, and SMEs' performance. Full mediation was found between technological factors and SMEs performance, and partial mediation was found between organizational and environmental factors and SMEs’ performance. Complementary mediation among the variables was also examined.Originality/valueThis paper has implications for practitioners and researchers interested in investigating social media adoption in SMEs. It builds an empirical, multi-dimensional hypothesized model, including several determinants that may influence the adoption of social media.     

Are the strategic research agendas of researchers in the social sciences determinants of research productivity?

Scientometrics - This study analyzes the association between the strategic research agendas of researchers in the social sciences and their research performance. Based on a worldwide sample of 604...     

Internationalization of academic journals: Is there still a gap between social and natural sciences?

In this study we compare internationalization of academic journals in six fields of science. Internationalization was investigated through journals’ concentration on publishing papers from particular countries, relationship between the geographical distributions of editors and authors, and relationship between language of publication and the geographical distribution of papers. Having analyzed more than 1,000 journals we can state that social sciences literature in the fields considered is still nationally and linguistically fragmented more than natural sciences literature, but in some cases the gap is not so big. One of the consequences concerning research output assessment is that usefulness of international databases having national disparity in coverage is still limited in social sciences.     

Developing environmental and social performance: the role of suppliers’ sustainability and buyer–supplier trust

We explore how environmental and social performance of manufacturing firms can be improved as sustainable supply chain management (SSCM) develops and evolves within a firm from internal to external practices. Importantly, this study considers how key suppliers’ sustainability performance and buyer–supplier trust mediate and moderate such a development. A conceptual framework is developed which relies on resource-based theories and emerging empirical evidence. Then, partial least square methodology is applied on survey data from a sample of Italian manufacturing firms. Results show that manufacturing firms’ sustainability performance improves as SSCM develops; however, while internal practices have a direct impact on performance, the effect of external practices on a manufacturing firm’s sustainability performance is fully mediated by key suppliers’ sustainability performance. Yet, buyer–supplier trust significantly influences the scope of such gains. Since evidence suggests that manufacturing firms are still struggling with how to leverage supply chain innovation potential for sustainable development, this study provides a timely and valuable contribution.     

Information literacy in social sciences and health sciences: a bibliometric study (1974–2011)

We examine the international scientific productivity on information literacy since its inception in 1974 until late 2011, based on a bibliometric analysis of scientific articles included in the web of science and Scopus databases. The sample comprised two macro-domains—the most productive and the least productive. The former was the area of social sciences (SoS), covering such disciplines as information and documentation, communication, education, management, etc. The latter was the area of health sciences (HeS), covering such disciplines as medicine, nursing, etc. The objective of the study was to analyse the evolution of research activity during this period, taking into account the authors’ production, the distribution and co-authorship of the works, the affiliation, and the most frequently used journals. A quantitative and qualitative methodological approach was taken, based on statistical, mathematical, and content analyses. The results showed exponential growth of the scientific publications in both domains (R ² = 0.9544 for SoS, and R ² = 0.9393 for HeS), with a predominance of Anglo-Saxon authors. Author productivity was low (1.29 and 1.12 papers/author), while the dispersion of articles by journal averaged 4.96 in SoS and 1.86 in HeS. Scientific collaboration exceeded 53 % in the SoS domain and 69 % in HeS. There was a major dispersion of the places of the authors’ affiliation. In both domains, the author distributions fitted Lotka’s law, and the journal distributions Bradford’s Law.     

Reductions in driver speed using posted feedback of speeding information: social comparison or implied surveillance?

Reducing driver speed has an essential role to play in traffic safety. This study measured the effect of a roadside sign, in a 50 km/h zone, that consecutively displayed one of three messages:

1. The average speed at the site: this message was designed to induce “social comparison” whereby drivers may reduce their speed in order to comply with the behaviour of the majority.

2. A warning that drivers’ speeds were being measured: this was intended to imply surveillance whereby drivers may reduce speed in order to avoid possible enforcement action.

3. A combination of both messages, to see if both together would have a greater effect than either alone.

The speed of drivers travelling along a busy urban road (11,500 cars daily in each direction) was measured using inductive loop detectors. The proportion of drivers travelling 60 km/h or less increased with all three messages, suggesting that both social comparison and implied surveillance are mechanisms by which driver speed may be reduced. However, the speed reductions were not as great as in previous studies of feedback signs. This may be due to differences in the existing safety culture.     

Does distance hinder the collaboration between Australian universities in the humanities,arts and social sciences?

Australia is a vast country with an average distance of 1911 km between its eight state capital cities. The quantitative impact of this distance on collaboration practices between Australian universities and between different types of Australian universities has not been examined previously and hence our knowledge about the spatial distribution effects, if any, on collaboration practices and opportunities is very limited. The aim of the study reported here was therefore to analyse the effect of distance on the collaboration activities of humanities, arts and social science scholars in Australia, using co-authorship as a proxy for collaboration. In order to do this, gravity models were developed to determine the distance effects on external collaboration between universities in relation to geographic region and institutional alliance of 25 Australian universities. Although distance was found to have a weak impact on external collaboration, the strength of the research publishing record within a university (internal collaboration) was found to be an important factor in determining external collaboration activity levels. This finding would suggest that increasing internal collaboration within universities could be an effective strategy to encourage external collaboration between universities. This strategy becomes even more effective for universities that are further away from each other. Establishing a hierarchical structure of different types of universities within a region can optimise the location advantage in the region to encourage knowledge exchange within that region. The stronger network could also attract more collaboration between networks.     

Scientometric definition of science: In what respect is the humanities more scientific than mathematical and social sciences?

“What is science” is not only intellectually interesting but also politically crucial in the proper allocation of budget. As science does not define itself and only philosophy defines everything including science, this paper first sketches the philosophical view of science. Then, hypotheses are presented as to what definition is actually given for science by scientific circles themselves. The hypotheses are tested in a scientometric way by observing the trend in the magazine Science. Unexpected results are obtained. The actual trend in Science does not reflect what has long been considered about science. Specifically, chemistry is at the top in the number of papers, far above physics. More papers are in historical sciences (part of the humanities) than in mathematics, computer science and social science. It is discussed in what respect chemistry is the most scientific, and the humanities is more scientific than the abovementioned three scientific fields. It is interpreted that, out of the two aspects in Galilei’s view of science (metodo compositivo and metodo risolutivo.), the latter (empirical solution of problems by using technical instruments) dominates the former (systematic theory using mathematics) in Science.     

Which role do non-source items play in the social sciences? A case study in political science in Germany

Publications that are not indexed by citation indices such as Web of Science (WoS) or Scopus are called “non-source items”. These have so far been neglected by most bibliometric analyses. The central issue of this study is to investigate the characteristics of non-source items and the effect of their inclusion in bibliometric evaluations in the social sciences, specifically German political science publications. The results of this study show that non-source items significantly increase the number of publications (+1,350 %) and to a lesser extent the number of citations from SCIE, SSCI, and A&HCI (+150 %) for evaluated political scientists. 42 % of non-source items are published as book chapters. Edited books and books are cited the most among non-source items. About 40 % of non-source items are in English, while 80 % of source items are in English. The citation rates of researchers taking non-source items into account are lower than those from source items, partially as a result of the limited coverage of WoS. In contrast, the H-indices of researchers taking only non-source items into account are higher than those from source items. In short, the results of this study show that non-source items should be included in bibliometric evaluations, regardless of their impact or the citations from them. The demand for a more comprehensive coverage of bibliometric database in the social sciences for a higher quality of evaluations is shown.