Exploring the scholarly communication styles of Arab social science and humanities scholars

The purpose of this paper is to report the findings of a study of scholarly communication behaviour among Arab scholars. The main objective of this study is to determine how Egyptian and Saudi Arabian social sciences and humanities scholars engage in scholarly communication practices. The study used a mixed-methods approach. A questionnaire was answered by a sample of 104 participants, followed by interviews with 36 participants to gain insight into the scholarly communication behaviour of the Arab scholars. The analysis demonstrated that participants use different styles of scholarly communication approaches. Most of the participants do use informal (social media) channels to communicate their research findings (particularly ResearchGate and Facebook), although priority is given to formal over informal publication in peer reviewed journals. Responses showed that the promotional systems of both countries dictate publication choices of scholars, reducing the amount of collaboration by ranking co-publications lower than sole publications and favouring printed journals over online-only journals.