LAUSR

This paper develops a better understanding of the explicit and implicit implications of the academic field’s competitization, with a specific focus on the role that academic social networks and platforms (ASNPs) play in this process. While ASNPs are embedded within a broad and complex ecology of academic competition we show that particularly ResearchGate offers a broad variety of tools for competitive subjectivation and thus can be seen as an important organizer and promoter of competition in academia. By applying a mixed-methods approach combining a structural analysis and a questionnaire study, we examine how and to what extent the platform ResearchGate contributes to the competitive subjectivation of its users. Therefore, we differentiate between suggested and enacted subjectivation. Concerning differences in age, gender and disciplinary background, our results show that ResearchGate is used more by younger and male researchers and especially younger researchers also perceive their work significantly more in a competitive context and thus also tend to act more competitively. While metric research evaluation is assessed as most important in the natural sciences and economics and rather unimportant in the humanities, subjectivation via the use of ResearchGate is perceived higher in the humanities, which are still less confronted with the competition ecology in academia.