SlideShare presentations, citations, users, and trends: A professional site with academic and educational uses

SlideShare is a free social web site that aims to help users to distribute and find presentations. Owned by LinkedIn since 2012, it targets a professional audience but may give value to scholarship through creating a long term record of the content of talks. This article tests this hypothesis by analysing sets of general and scholarly-related SlideShare documents using content and citation analysis and popularity statistics reported on the site. The results suggest that academics, students and teachers are a minority of SlideShare uploaders, especially since 2010, with most documents not being directly related to scholarship or teaching. About two thirds of uploaded SlideShare documents are presentation slides, with the remainder often being files associated with presentations or video recordings of talks. SlideShare is therefore a presentation-centred site with a predominantly professional user base. Although a minority of the uploaded SlideShare documents are cited by, or cite, academic publications, probably too few articles are cited by SlideShare to consider extracting SlideShare citations for research evaluation. Nevertheless, scholars should consider SlideShare to be a potential source of academic and non-academic information, particularly in library and information science, education and business.