Answer Quality Characteristics and Prediction on an Academic Q&A Site: A Case Study on ResearchGate

Despite various studies on examining and predicting answer quality on generic social Q&A sites such as Yahoo! Answers, little is known about why answers on academic Q&A sites are voted on by scholars who follow the discussion threads to be high quality answers. Using 1021 answers obtained from the Q&A part of an academic social network site ResearchGate (RG), we firstly explored whether various web-captured features and human-coded features can be the critical factors that influence the peer-judged answer quality. Then using the identified critical features, we constructed three classification models to predict the peer-judged rating. Our results identify four main findings. Firstly, responders’ authority, shorter response time and greater answer length are the critical features that positively associate with the peer-judged answer quality. Secondly, answers containing social elements are very likely to harm the peer-judged answer quality. Thirdly, an optimized SVM algorithm has an overwhelming advantage over other models in terms of accuracy. Finally, the prediction based on web-captured features had better performance when comparing to prediction on human-coded features. We hope that these interesting insights on ResearchGate’s answer quality can help the further design of academic Q&A sites.