| Many academic social networking sites aiming at scientific researchers have sprung up rapidly,attracting a large number of users,and become a major supplementary means for scientific researchers to obtain information,carry out academic activities,build social networks,and even gradually change their behavior.In order to attract new users and ensure the continuous development of the platform,the academic social networking sites have been increasing and improving their own functions.At the same time,the questioning and answering(Q&A)communities have become a research hotspot.The use of academic social Q&A platforms for knowledge exchange is not only conducive to the stable development of the platform,but also conducive to enhancing users' perception of the usefulness of the platform.However,many benefits brought by user knowledge exchange depend on whether the questions and answers in the platform can attract the attention of other users,that is,the size of information popularity.For specific information and specific time,information popularity can be regarded as people's attention to the information in a certain period of time.When it is difficult for users seeking information to receive enough feedback,or when it is difficult for users providing information to get the approval of others,the efficiency of knowledge exchange will inevitably be affected.Therefore,it is of great significance to explore the influencing factors of information popularity in academic social Q&A platforms for promoting knowledge exchange between scholars.Based on the social exchange theory and the social capital theory,this paper constructs the research model.The influencing factors of information popularity in academic social Q&A platforms come from three aspects:the way of statement,the information provider and the attributes of information itself.In this model,information providers' academic influence,historical experience,social exposure,information authority and text length,problem-focused statements,procedural statements,emotional statements and action statements all have an impact on information popularity.In order to verify the research model,this paper selects ResearchGate,the most popular academic social networking sites,as the research context,and collects data from three disciplines.The final research sample includes 789 questions and 9181 corresponding answers.The popularity of questions is measured by the amount of questions read,followed,answered and recommended.The popularity of answers is measured by the amount of recommended answers.The indicators related to the characteristics of information providers are measured by the user data collected from the platform.The characteristics of the information itself are from the analysis of the text,and the acquisition of information statements is based on the content analysis of the text.For the methods of data analysis,this paper first reports the relevant variables one by one using descriptive statistical analysis,and highlights the disciplinary differences between questions and answers.Then,the correlation analysis is carried out for the variables related to the questions and answers respectively.At the same time,it checks whether there is multicollinearity between the independent variables,and the correlation between the independent variables and the dependent variables in order to preliminarily verifies the research model.Finally,multi-level regression was employed to identify the factors that have significant impact on the popularity of questions and answers.The results are following.First,from the perspective of disciplinary differences,users in Social Sciences use active statements more frequently than users in Humanities and natural sciences when asking questions.Users in the field of Natural Science are the most succinct when asking questions,while users in the field of Humanities tend to use longer texts.Correspondingly,users in the field of Humanities use more frequently references and external links.In addition,users in from Natural Science use question-focused statements slightly less frequently than users in Humanities and Social Sciences,but users from the two fields use procedural statements,emotional statements and action statements slightly more frequently.Corresponding to the length of question descriptions,the average number of answer words used by users in the field of Humanities is significantly higher than that of users from other fields,and users in the field of Natural Science have the most concise answers.Second,from the perspective of factors that affect the popularity of questions,the number of question-reads is significantly positively affected by problem-focused statements,positive procedural statements,the academic influence of questioners and the length of the text.However,the historical experience of questioners has a negative effect on the number of question-reads.The number of question-following is positively affected by problem-focused statements,positive emotional statement,positive procedural statement,the academic influence of questioners,social exposure and authority of the text.The number of questionanswer is positively affected by problem-focused statements,positive emotional statements,positive procedural statements,historical experiences of questioners and text-length.The number of question-recommendations is positively affected by problem-focused statements,positive emotional statements and text-length.Third,from the perspective of the factors that influence the popularity of answers,problem-focused statements,positive procedural statements and positive action statements can significantly increase the number of recommendations,while positive emotional statements,negative procedural statements and negative action statements can play the opposite role.The academic influence and social exposure of the respondents,the length and authority of the response text have a positive impact on the number of recommendations,but the historical experience of the respondents has a negative impact on the number of recommendations. |
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