Abstract: 【Purpose/significance】The purpose of this paper is to improve the effectiveness of communication among users and provide references for the optimization of the platform by exploring the Q&A behavior and demand characteristics of knowledge consumers in the Q&A service of academic social networking sites (ASNSs).【Method/process】Taking the knowledge consumers in Q&A service of ResearchGate as the research object,this paper makes a comparative analysis of the user behaviors among industries,universities and research institutions through variance analysis,hierarchical clustering and social network analysis.From the perspective of time,it fur⁃ther reveals the evolution of behavioral characteristics and the trend of information demand【. Result/conclusion】As far as the question⁃ing characteristics of knowledge consumers are concerned,there are some similarities in terms of questioning length of title,counts of
tags and their trend among industries,universities and research institutions.As for the demand of knowledge consumers,users from in⁃dustries,universities and research institutions concern scatteredly.Universities and research institutions have more topics in common, but their individualized needs account for a higher proportion.On the contrary,individualized needs of industries account for a rela⁃tively low proportion.During the period of 2010-2019,high-frequency topics in common present a steady or weak downward trend.High-frequency topics of industries mostly show a downward trend,while the high-frequency topics of universities and research insti⁃tutes show an upward trend【. Innovation/limitation】This paper studies and compares behaviors of knowledge consumers from the new
institutional perspective,which can help promote the improvement of Q&A utility for users and the optimization of Q&A services for ASNSs; we only select top industries,universities,research institutions and ResearchGate for research,which may have certain limita⁃tions.