Organizers and promoters of academic competition? The role of (academic) social networks and platforms in the competitization of science

Current academia, and especially economics, is characterized by an increasing application of quantitative evaluation methods and technologies (QEMTs) for the assessment of research practices which are the basis of a broad range of different competitive formats on several ontological levels. Metrics, rankings, and impact scores are today a prime example of evaluation scores that have a formative impact on career trajectories of individual scholars, the reputation and financial endowment of academic institutions, and the attraction of national knowledge hubs in knowledge-based economies. Again, scholars working in the field of economics are particularly confronted what was called the ‘metric tide’, an ever-increasing reliance on QEMT as seemingly objective measure for the valuation of scientific knowledge. Against this background our proposed chapter builds upon the analytical framework of competition research and focuses on the impact of academic social networks and platforms (ASNPs) on the subjectification of a ‘competitive self’ in academia. Competition research has shown that effective competition requires not only competitive actors, scarce resources, and third-party juries, but also fourth-party entities organizing competition and its associated allocation mechanisms. In this respect, ASNPs such as Google Scholar, ResearchGate, and Twitter represent a comparably new form of organizing institutions of academic competition that are especially prevalent among economists. In this chapter, we contribute to a better understanding of the different logics of organizing academic competition on these ASNP and thus their impact on the competitization of science by, first, applying a comparative analysis of the history of these three ASNPs and, second, by examining in detail their respective use of metrics and scores.