The visibility of research in academic social media platforms at S.A. universities

Academic Social Media (ASM) provides researchers with limitless opportunities to promote, share, preserve, and evaluate research. ASM includes ResearchGate, Mendeley, Academia.edu, Zotero. This study seeks to determine the visibility and impact of South African Universities’ research output and researchers in ASM platforms and bibliographic databases, specifically Academia.edu, ORCiD, Scopus and Google Scholar. This study was motivated by the existence of an academic lacuna on the visibility and impact of SA researchers in ASM.