Outcompeting Traditional Peers? Scholarly Social Networks and Academic Output

In this paper we evaluate the interplay between scholarly social networking and academic output. To this end, we tested the hypotheses that the activity of users on scholarly social networks is associated with academic output, and that the intra-or interdisciplinary background of scholars affects academic output and online activity. The quantitative data used for this study was collected from the publicly-accessible scholarly social network HASTAC and complemented with a qualitative survey collected from 123 students and recent alumni of the HASTAC Scholars Program. After processing the different sources of data, we rejected the hypotheses that academic output and activity on scholarly social networks are affected by scholar's intra-or interdisciplinary backgrounds, but our results partially support the hypothesis that activity in scholarly networks is associated with academic output. Finally, we discuss the generalizability of our findings and argue that online activity and academic output are both likely driven by networked Scholars committed to academic research.