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Do researchers provide public or institutional E‐mail accounts as correspondence E‐mails in scientific articles?
Author(s) -
Kozak Marcin,
Iefremova Olesia,
Szkoła Jarosław,
Sas Daniel
Publication year - 2015
Publication title -
journal of the association for information science and technology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.903
H-Index - 145
eISSN - 2330-1643
pISSN - 2330-1635
DOI - 10.1002/asi.23401
Subject(s) - electronic mail , institution , public institution , public relations , perception , library science , sociology , internet privacy , political science , psychology , computer science , social science , law , neuroscience
Whether one should use a public e‐mail account (e.g., G mail, Y ahoo!) or an institutional one (e.g., @wsiz.rzeszow.pl, @medicine.ox.ac.uk) as an address for correspondence is an important aspect of scientific communication. Some authors consider that public e‐mail services are unprofessional and insecure, whereas others say that, in a dynamically changing working environment, public e‐mail addresses allow readers to contact authors long after they have changed their workplace. To shed light on this issue, we analyzed how often authors of scientific papers provided e‐mail addresses that were either public or institution based. We selected from the W eb of S cience database 1,000 frequently cited and 1,000 infrequently cited articles (all of the latter were noncited articles) published in 2000, 2005, and 2010, and from these we analyzed 26,937 e‐mail addresses. The results showed that approximately three fourths of these addresses were institutional, but there was an increasing trend toward using public e‐mail addresses over the period studied. No significant differences were found between frequently and infrequently cited papers in this respect. Further research is now needed to access the motivations and perceptions of scholars when it comes to their use of either public or institutional e‐mail accounts.