Dear Michael John McAleer

" if an Answer breaks one of the rules and regulations of RG, then it should be reported to RG Support."

I have done this numerous times. RG administration responds that they would consider my report, but never makes any action.

I agree that downvoting is not a good idea. I was abused by downvoting many times. I could reformulate my question to:

"How to increase the value of recommendations?"

With respect, I do not agree that Recommendations have been "completely discredited".

I was not participating in Q&A with options of "down-voting" and "upvoting", but both are clearly open to abuse.

Without going into details, if an Answer breaks one of the rules and regulations of RG, then it should be reported to RG Support.

If our reaction to an Answer is negative, so what?

It should be understood that RG is, in practice, academic social media, regardless of what might have been intended at inception.

Yurii V Geletii. Thank you for initiating this thread.

I follow very few threads on RG, but I do so to a sufficient extent to see two patterns of recommendations. One is little groups of mutual admiration societies who recommend many of each other's posts regardless of how banal those posts are. The other pattern is represented by individuals who seem to dive onto RG sporadically and happily recommend almost every post in sight.

Both groups are easily identifiable and predictable - and to me there is some sport in seeing whether they are maintaining their games.

I confess to not liking the notion of downvoting, but I also dislike the vacuousness and sycophancy that accompanies many recommendations.

Dear Michael John McAleer

" if an Answer breaks one of the rules and regulations of RG, then it should be reported to RG Support."

I have done this numerous times. RG administration responds that they would consider my report, but never makes any action.

I agree that downvoting is not a good idea. I was abused by downvoting many times. I could reformulate my question to:

"How to increase the value of recommendations?"

I have found that RG Support responds swiftly to inappropriate (or any) forms of advertising, and to overly harsh and unwarranted criticisms of academics by name.

Constant carping and repeating the same personal dislikes are permitted, so we live with it, regardless of how annoying it can be.

I regard "downvoting" as far more abusive than "upvoting" as the former enables the worst types of behaviour.

"Recommendations are discredited" means for me that my recommendation of someone's comment does not have any value. The forum is flooded by "recommendations"

I think the downvote might help lessen the "I agree", the repeating of a previous comments, and would help to show when an answer is wrong. A lot of the answers (I read mostly stats questions) are not correct and this is a problem for using RG. The stack* pages have up and down voting, and the questioners ticks an answer. I think this makes these a better source for example, if searching the web for an answer. I don't know why they removed the downvote? Does anyone on this thread know?

I agree that there are some valid criticisms of Recommendations, but i was disagreeing with "completely".

To Yuri V Geletii :

Your Question (which is not really a Question) is sufficiently clear that it is not necessary to change it to:

"How to increase the value of recommendations?"

which is actually a Question.

The only caveat would be that you are presumably associating Recommendations with Q&A rather than with Publications.

While on the subject, why ignore Reads in Q&A?

After all, replying with unhelpful one-word Answers constitutes Reads, so you might rephrase the Question as:

"How to increase the value of Reads and Recommendations in Q&A?"

Any alternative question (this is a discussion, but like Michael John McAleer I like questions), would be: how can RG make these useful for someone searching for an answer? This would mean: having them easy to find, having the questions written better (e.g., I have lots of variables, how can I analyze them> Deadline tomorrow), and differentiating good responses from both the worthless ones (the repeats, I agrees, etc.) and the wrong ones (in my field these seem someone entering the one stats procedure they have heard of, regardless of what the questioner has asked). The issue seems to be that RG's business model does not share this goal. There are lots of good answers on RG and good discussions, but a lot that are not good.

Sometimes recommendations are not there to questions asked or answers given as these are poorly understood by many of esteemed research gate members.

For clarity. I did not ask a question but open a discussion on recommendations in A$Q forum.

To Yurii V Geletii :

My abject apologies for not having seen the topic heading as "Discussion" rather than "Question".

Would the replies then be Answers or Discussions?

This is a fruitful Discussion, with strong differences of opinion being met with politeness and no evidence of sarcasm.

I note that Yurii V Geletii wrote:

" I could reformulate my question to:

"How to increase the value of recommendations?" "

It is of no import whether the interesting forum is based on a Discussion or Question, and similarly for the Replies, Discussions or Answers, or all of the above, as the content is what matters.

I don't understand why everyone is so concerned about RG scores. RG scores are an artificial grading system devised the Researchgate to increase traffic on this site.

RG score is slightly usefull as a means to distingush between veteran commentators who appear to have contributed significantly to past discussions and those who have not. Researchers with high RG scores often give high quality answers - but sometime they do not.

I do not believe RG scores have any value other than possible bragging rights between two competitors trying to win some sort of RG score contest.

Dear Rick Manner ,

this discussion has nothing to do with RG score

Chia-Lin Chang , absence of sarcasm is not a virtue, but rather a dull state of absence of sarcasm. I am happy to report that I have no evidence of dullness of Dr's Yurii V Geletii statements and I support them fully, or at lest I support them at 99.9% (dull statement with no sarcasm).

Yuri - I disagree. I think recommendations are used in the calculation of RG Sores and that people often recommend each others' answers in an effort to increase RG scores,. I believe Impacting RG scores is the primary purpose of the recommend button.

If you are talking about real life recommendations (actual letters or meetings with prospective employers or tenure committees) RG scores are unimportant, But if you mean clicking the recommend button the primary reason to do that is to impact an RG score.

I think recommendation is misleading

Rick Manner ,

Yours " I think recommendations are used in the calculation of RG Sores " is not correct. Recommendations are not taken into account in calculations of RG score.

I have RG score 208, a contributions of recommendations is 0%. A breakdown of your 77.46 Score is:

0.25% Publications

3.49% Questions

96.19% Answers

0.06% Followers,

You get 0% from recommendations.

Just check your profile and click "score" to see the breakdown.

We people should not guess about the role of recommendations to increase the score. They could simply look at their profile.

Dear Anjay. The recommendation are only to support someone's post

Very good question.

Yurii V Geletii

As I understand it, the Answers score is based on the number of recommendations your answers have received, and the Questions score is based on the number of recommendations your questions have received (not the number of questions you have asked, or answers given).

In that way it is a type of peer review, but I would agree that not only is it imperfect but also it is open to abuse. However, I think that provided it is treated with skepticism, it is a useful tool to judge the quality of answers and answerers.

Recommendation tend to favour those with lower RG scores than the person giving the Recommendation:

" The higher the RG Scores of those who interact with your research, the more your own score will increase. A low-quality contribution probably won't attract positive feedback and recognition from the community, so it won't contribute to your score in any significant way. "

https://explore.researchgate.net/display/support/RG+Score

Q&A and Reads and Recommendations improve the RG score.

RG says so !

https://explore.researchgate.net/display/support/RG+Score

" To improve your RG Score:

• Ask a question or give another researcher a helpful answer
• Comment on and recommend your peer's research, projects, and questions. "

Michael John McAleer and Rick Manner ,

you might be right about the effect of recommendations on RG score. This results in unfair increase of RG score based on unfair recommendations. This raises a question of the value of recommendations.

To Yurii V Geletii

Both Reads and Recommendations can affect the RG score, and both can be manipulated artificially.

Reads and Recommendations for Publications are more difficult to game, so TRI is more robust that the RG score.

I am not worried about their affect on RG score. Anyone who uses that for any important purposes should be downvoted ;o) . What I am worried about is whether recommendations help readers (and the original questioner) to identify which responses are useful. If this is a goal of RG, then RG should improve the system for this. Personally, I think the first step is sorting out the questions themselves. I guess the real issue is that this may not be part of their business model.

RG score is an atificial measure of how well each of us paticipates on the site that is kept secret and probably calculated diferently from time to time with the primary purpose of increasing the activity on the site. Those with very high RG scores (like Yuri) probably derserve some level of respect for their acomplishment but RG score is not a measure of who is the best scientist. If you join in interesting conversations and make relevant comments you score will probably go up but. You may even have some fun asking and answering questions and trying to figure out how to make your RG score go up but its just a game. RG score really doesn't matter very much especially to a mostly retired old engineer like me.

To Rick Manner:

The relevance, importance, usefulness or otherwise of the RG score is an issue to every active academic in Q&A.

Michael John McAleer

Why do real academics with real research accomplishments care at all about RG score? RG score is a game that was invented and manipulated to increase traffic on a website. RG's real value is that it enables "researchers" to communicate with many other researchers through a channel that was not previously available. It enables a free flow of ideas and information exchange that may have been much more difficult if RG didn't exist.

To Rick Manner:

Whenever an Answer mentions the RG score, it is clearly an "issue", as in your Answers and mine, as well as for any academic who reads and/or recommends a post.

Whether any academic cares about the issue is a separate matter, which is why "or otherwise" was included.

Dear Ruth Olsson

Your answer "If the RG score is very high and the h-factor very low this may indicate that the person has psychological problems" has been already discussed.

Scholars having RG Score above 100 ?Yurii V Geletii

• Jul 20, 2019

Answer The useless discussion continues. Graphomania is an incurable and contagious decease. The only way to stop is to ignore the thread. From now I ignore this thread.