RESEARCH ARTICLE (wileyonlinelibrary.com) doi: 10.1002/leap.1253 Received: 21 February 2019 | Accepted: 17 June 2019 Exploring the scholarly communication styles of Arab social science and humanities scholars Ahmed Maher Khafaga Shehata Department of Library and Information Science, Faculty of Arts, Minia Univerity, Minya 61519, Egypt ORCID: 0000-0002-5447-5867 E-mail: ahmed.shehata17@mu.edu.eg Abstract 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 for- mal over informal publication in peer reviewed journals. Responses showed that the promotional systems of both countries dictate publica- tion choices of scholars, reducing the amount of collaboration by ranking co-publications lower than sole publications and favouring printed journals over online-only journals. INTRODUCTION The advancement of scholarly research in academia mainly depends on the research outputs of scholars published in peer reviewed journals. Producing research results is not sufficient for the progress of scholarly research as researchers need to commu- nicate their scholarly findings to other peers in the field. The scholarly communication behaviour of researchers var- ies from one researcher to another. Each researcher has a unique approach to communicate his or her research findings through formal and informal channels (Shehata, 2017; Shehata, Ellis, & Foster, 2015a, 2015b). Scholars seek to reach a wider audience in order to improve their scholarly reputation, find scholarly collaboration opportunities, and increase the number of citations of their research (Assante, Candela, Castelli, Man- ghi, & Pagano, 2015; Jamali, Nicholas, & Herman, 2015; Tenopir et al., 2017). Many studies have tried to model scholarly communication behaviour and have managed to describe the scholarly communi- cation behaviour of various groups of scholars (e.g.Bjork, 2005 ; Garvey, 1979 ; Garvey & Griffith, 1972 ; Khosrowjerdi, 2011 ; Shehata, 2017 ; Trine Fjordback, Jack, & Birger, 2003). However, few studies have explored the scholarly communication behav- iour of non-English-speaking researchers. The overarching aim of the study is to establish an under- standing of the scholarly communication practices of Arab social science and humanities scholars. Previous studies that explored the scholarly publishing and information-seeking behaviour of Arab scholars concluded that scholarly practices may differ among them (Al-Muomen, Morris, & Maynard, 2012; Al-Suqri, 2011; Al-Wreikat, Rafferty, & Foster, 2015; Elgllab & Shehata, 2017). Understanding the scholarly communication behaviour of Arab scholars may lead to a better understanding of research practices in Arab countries. Learned Publishing 2019 www.learned-publishing.org © 2019 The Author(s). Learned Publishing © 2019 ALPSP. 1