Analyzing the Scientific Presence of Iranian Inventor Women in LinkedIn and ResearchGate Social Networks

ResearchGate and LinkedIn are considered as professional research social networks, respectively, with purposes such as scientific communication, promoting the visibility of scientific and technological works, altmetrics studies, being up-to-date with the profession, and are also for job search. However, considering the changes and developments that have taken place in the last decade, we have seen a significant increase in patents registered by Iranians, especially by participation of Iranian women, in international databases such as the USPTO, which indicates the active presence of Iranian inventor women in various technological fields. Therefore, the main objective of this study is to analyze the Iranian inventor women’s scientific presence in scientific-social network LinkedIn and ResearchGate.

This applied research was conducted quantitatively, utilizing the library method and social network analysis in the field of scientometrics, along with the altimetric approach. The statistical research population is, 211 Iranian inventor women who had a patent in the USPTO database in the period of 1971–2021. Also, using the purposive sampling method, a sample of 110 inventors (52.1%) who were members of two social-scientific networks, LinkedIn and ResearchGate, between August 30, 2022, and September 19, 2022, was selected. To collect the research required data, first, in the advanced search section of the USPTO database, three commands "ICN/IR," "ACN/IR" and "AACO/IR" were searched. With these three commands, all patents whose country code of inventor or owner was "IR" were retrieved; but because of the similarity between some countries in this database, such as Ireland's country (Maloney; Ian (Dublin, IR)), many patents that were retrieved were not related to Iran. To solve this problem, the keyword of geographic location was used and three commands "IC/City," "AC/City" and "AACI/City" were also searched. Here, city is referred to the provincial centers of Iran (for example, "IC/Tehran","AC/Tehran" and "AACI/Tehran"). Then, all the data were entered into the Excel file. After merging and refining the data, we extracted the names of 211 Iranian inventor women. This information was based on 184 title patents registered in the USPTO database from 1971 to 2021, which involved at least one Iranian woman inventor. Then, each of these names was searched in two social-scientific networks, LinkedIn and ResearchGate, between 2022/08/30 and 2022/09/19. After that, the required data were collected by referring to the profile of each inventor using a checklist. Finally, the data were analyzed using Excel and Spss software.

More than half of the Iranian inventor women (110 people) were scientific social network members, LinkedIn and ResearchGate. From the profile personal information viewpoint, most of them had an informal personal photo, no biography and unclear language. Most of them were Ph.D. and very few had their contact information listed in their profiles. Also, 42.7% of them mentioned their patents on LinkedIn and 48.2% on ResearchGate. Qudsi Mohammadi Ziarani, with 453 works on ResearchGate and 102 on LinkedIn, has contributed the most compared with other Iranian inventor women in terms of presenting publications and research articles. Additionally, in terms of the new research index interest score and other indices available in ResearchGate, Fatemeh Atyabi has the largest share compared to others, with a research interest score of 5490 and 10374 citations, h-index of 56 and 84801 readings.

This study results indicate that the Iranian inventor women presence importance is in introducing themselves, communication, and scientific research collaboration with colleagues. Even though scientific-social networks LinkedIn and ResearchGate provide a suitable platform for more communication and interactions between users and researchers, inventors, employers, etc., but most Iranian inventor women have not used the maximum facilities and capabilities provided in these networks. Inventors can improve their personal page rank in Google results by completing their profile information in these networks and adding more details to it. They can also attract more researchers and audiences to their scientific and technological work by specifying different ways of communication in their profile. In addition, by publicly presenting their profile, inventors can increase the visibility of their work, leading to more citations and opportunities to commercialize scientific and technological products. This can serve as a pathway for entering the business world and marketing scientific products.