The dynamics of Q&A in academic social networking sites: insights from participants, interaction network, response time, and discipline differences

A growing number of scholars are using academic social networking sites (ASNSs) for informal academic exchange online. ASNSs have developed question and answer (Q & A) services to help scholars obtain directly relevant information from their peers. There is a paucity of research on Q & A use and interaction in the scholarly community beyond static analyses on Q & A content and influencing factors of using social Q & A sites. This study fills in the gap by examining the Q & A participants and interactions on ResearchGate, a worldwide ASNS, based on a sample of 3933 Q & A entries across five disciplines with 13,655 participants during 2018-2020. The results show that question respondents tend to have a higher scholarly reputation and social connectivity than questioners in most disciplines. Most core users in the Q & A interaction network are interdisciplinary, with Social Sciences' core users having the strongest influence. In terms of response time, the question-answer and answer-answer time intervals conform to the power-law distribution of fat tail characteristics. Physical Sciences questions receive the quickest response among disciplines. The findings of this study expand and support the notion of disciplinary differences in information behavior. Research on Q & A behavior of ASNS users not only helps expand our understanding of information behaviors in various disciplinary contexts, but also allows such platforms to formulate incentive strategies to facilitate interaction, information seeking and sharing.