Study the profile picture status of faculty members in informationscience and science in academic social networks

Considering the importance and increasing rate ofsocial networks utilization amongst scientific societies, the present studywas conducted to analyze the profile picture of faculty members ofinformation sciences in academic social networks, and analyze theirprobabilistic patterns for the picture selection.

It was a descriptive and survey type study and aresearcher-made questionnaire was used to collect data from 45 facultymembers in governmental universities of the country. Analyzing data wasmade with SPSS and Chi-square test.

It showed that 51.1% of the faculties used the same pictures forvarious scientific social networks. 64.4 %, occasionally replaced theirpictures; 24.4 % of them noted that providing a new image of themselveswas the main reason to make changes on their profile pictures. The mostcommonly used image template was the official photo and the mostimportant reason for the current image was the attraction of a picture.Examining the research hypotheses, it was found that there is a significantrelationship between their profile image profile, gender, age and academicrank. The relationship between changing the picture and the gender washigh; while, it was moderate compared to the scientific level and ageamongst faculties. Moreover, most of the faculty members despite theirgender, age, and academic rank, used official pictures; however the rate ofusing officialprofile pictures was higher among men, those with professorlevel rank and those in 36 to 40 age range. These findings were similar tothe results of demographic and profile characteristics of faculty members.

In academic social networks, interactions and communicationsare official and users are supposed to share their scientific output and experiences, so they have to present their official aspect of themselves insuch an environment. It seems that profile pictures in these networks areimportant to researchers in attracting scholars, colleagues and expanding thescholarly network, so they try to identify and accept those with the sameattitudes and manners.