Education Scholars from Eastern Europe in the Digital Environment: A Comparative Study of Selected Universities from Poland, Slovakia, Hungary, and Serbia

One of the most common methods for creating a presence in the scientific virtual space is the e-profile as a "digital representation" of a researcher. The aim of this study was to compare the e-visibility of academics, to examine the correlation between researchers’ visibility and their productivity, as well as to identify the main predictors of the e-visibility of the academics affiliated with selected universities/institutes in Poland, Slovakia, Hungary and Serbia. Five platforms most often used for the digital representation were selected for the study: Web of Science, Scopus, Google Scholar Citation, ResearchGate and Academia.edu. The research included qualitative and quantitative analysis of collected data available on relevant websites. The results showed that academics from Eastern Europe do have e-profiles on scholarly platforms. However, differences were evident, especially concerning the WoS and Scopus databases. A positive correlation was confirmed between visibility and productivity, indicating that scholars with more e-profiles and publications, especially in a foreign language were the most effective and were cited most often. Linear regression analysis showed that the most important predictors for the scholarly visibility were publications in English language posted in e-profiles, and papers indexed in the prestigious bibliographic databases WoS and Scopus.