Challenged by academic social networks: a case study inside University of Lisbon’ institutional repository

This communication reflects on the challenges brought by academic social networks to institutional repositories. The study reveals the practices of academics from the Faculties of Dental Medicine, Psychology and the Institute of Education on the issue of the visibility of scientific information in academic social networks and in institutional repositories. The data were obtained by analysing the profiles of professors and researchers in a professional social network, ResearchGate, crossed with the documents of the Institutional Repository of the University of Lisbon (Repositório.UL), related to the studied schools. Statistical methods and quantitative data were used to compare the behaviours of the teachers and the researchers concerning their preferences on scientific document dissemination throughout the World Wide Web.