Altmetrics and Visualisation – The Complementary Tools for Analysing Scientific Collaboration and Behaviour on ResearchGate

Altmetrics, as a new scientometric measure, shows the scholarly impact of a scientist and her/his social activity on social networking platforms. We analysed communication on ResearchGate within the group formed by Nicolaus Copernicus University different domains researchers. They share interest in information visualisation and form local collaboration team. We considered two compositions of research sample: the original team and the nearest collaborators. The common attributes of RG users such as coauthorship, skills set, topics, and ascribed domains were analysed. Based on these units, we carry out the sociographs to reveal social structure dynamics. Domain analysis was performed by the use of the PCA – the method which is able to extract the most essential factors from the variables set. The results indicate a good coincidence for these two approaches: collaboration between researchers and their skills development can significantly change their major. We strived to show that RG is a space of interdisciplinary training in building and identifying their own field research based on full text. Thus RG is a proper tool for crossdisciplinary qualitative analysis. Altmetrics and visualisation are mutually substituted and complemented devices, perceived as new tools for team science study. This requires, nevertheless, not only the use of appropriate tools, but also collecting a large dataset on global scientific activity within multidisciplinary groups.