In December 2024, my preprint of P.A. Kozhevin’s article "Microbial Ecology in the Digital Age " on ResearchGate (in Russian) showed extraordinary statistics: up to 6,000 views and 2,000 downloads per day for an entire month — over 500 times higher than my usual activity.
Curiously, all this traffic with no specific institutions, affiliations, or IP details provided. There were no citations, comments, or signs of actual scientific engagement — only a steady, machine-like wave of requests.
I suspect this was not genuine academic interest, but rather large-scale web scraping by a bot network, possibly aimed at training AI models or building a corpus on digital biology, philosophy of science, or microbiology.
The irony is striking: an article that criticizes blind faith in big data in biology and artificial intelligence became itself a target of algorithmic consumption — without understanding, context, or spirit.
What do you think, colleagues? Have you experienced similar anomalies? How can we distinguish real scientific impact from digital noise?
Dear Petr Kozhevin Another check can answer this 'mystery'. If you go to Stats in your profile and click on for example last week you can compare:
-Reads
-Research Interest Score and check how many reads add to your score
'Normally' only 10-20% max. are reads that are add to your score. Meaning that a relatively small percentage are reads by RG readers. All the rest are reads collected from 'elsewhere' (meaning Google, Google Scholar etc.).
Indeed very likely gathered by bots.
Best regards.
PS. See also https://help.researchgate.net/hc/en-us/articles/14293473316753-Research-Interest-Score
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