Do ResearchGate Scores create ghost academic reputations????

Goodwin, S., Jeng, W., & He, D. (2014). Changing communication on ResearchGate through interface updates. Proceedings of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 51(1), 1-4.

It is evidenced that there are disparities in TRI and RG scores among RG members. Explanations are not clear to me.

Dear Harasit,

Many thanks for the valuable contribution/insights and your time...really welcome additional posts and contributions for the other questions posted by me as well...

RG of European Higher Education Institutions...For HEIs in the Web of Science, the RG Score is more correlated with number of publications than with the citation impact....

The ResearchGate Score should not be used for comparing institutions by research quality....Lepori, B., Thelwall, M., & Hoorani, B. H. (2018). Which US and European Higher Education Institutions are visible in ResearchGate and what affects their RG score?. Journal of Informetrics, 12(3), 806-818.

Optimal unweighted Markov analysis revealed that the weekly RG-score data studied presently zig-zag up and down across sequential weeks...Yarnold, P. R. (2020). Optimal weighted Markov analysis: Modeling weekly RG-score. Optimal Data Analysis, 9, 122-123.

On the whole, with a little effort and without any academic publications of our own we were able to achieve an RG score which was higher than almost half the scores of all ResearchGate users...Meier, A., & Tunger, D. (2018). Investigating the transparency and influenceability of altmetrics using the example of the RG score and the ResearchGate platform. Information Services & Use, 38(1-2), 99-110.

...Findings obtained for the other attributes which were evaluated herein were notably weaker than results for number of citations. Unweighted analysis of the number of recommendations was not statistically significant (p

RG statistics are not 100 percent accurate. There are some disparities and inaccuracies in the reports

...While one might say that the ultimate purpose of science is to contribute to the well-being of humanity, and that under such a perspective the only permissible “ranking” of scientists should be an indicator, which tells us how many people now live happier and longer than without the scientist’s work, the lamentable fact is that there is now a real ranking-mania in almost any discipline nowadays. Researchgate, as a relatively new and growing network of scientists nowadays even tags discussion contributions by the size of the newly developed RG score and journal impact factors and what have you, as if the correct opinion of a person with an “RG score” of 10 counts less than the opinion of a RG superstar with an RG score of, say, 40 or more.

The mentioned RG Score, which really glares at you when you even log on to the Research Gate system, is an overall score of the ranking of scientists participating in the Research Gate system and is – upon closer inspection – seriously flawed and contradicts the established scientific ranking systems provided by other, much more respected sources. By wrongly labeling scientists in one category or the other with that RG blue arrow telling you that you are either at the top, at the miserable bottom or somewhere in the middle, it even could intervene in such processes as the negotiation of publishing contracts with publishers and potentially damages what the laws of many countries around the world nowadays with justification call “the credit worthiness” of a scientist...Tausch, A. (2014). Researchgate, RG-Scores, or a true Research Gate to Global Research? On the limits of the RG factor and some scientometric evidence on how the current RG score system discriminates against economic and social sciences and against the developing countries.

...rankings based on ResearchGate statistics correlate moderately well with other rankings of academic institutions, suggesting that ResearchGate use broadly reflects the traditional distribution of academic capital. Moreover, while Brazil, India, and some other countries seem to be disproportionately taking advantage of ResearchGate, academics in China, South Korea, and Russia may be missing opportunities to use ResearchGate to maximize the academic impact of their publications....Thelwall, M., & Kousha, K. (2015). R esearch G ate: Disseminating, communicating, and measuring Scholarship?. Journal of the Association for information Science and technology, 66(5), 876-889.

The RG is not accurate in 100%

RG's research interest another undisclosed (and redundant) algorithm...Copiello, S. (2019). Research Interest: another undisclosed (and redundant) algorithm by ResearchGate. Scientometrics, 120(1), 351-360.

In my opinion, Researchgate score does not measure precisely the prestige of researchers, but instead their level of participation in the platform.

I am also confused and unable to understand the criteria or terms for increase of RI and RG score.

No idea

… RG also provides two in-house altmetric scores known as the RG score and the Research Interest score, although in both cases serious questions have been raised about the legitimacy of the altmetric, due to a lack of transparency surrounding its calculation …Mason, S. (2020). Adoption and usage of Academic Social Networks: a Japan case study. Scientometrics, 122(3), 1751-1767.

… elements of knowledge between scientific disciplines through the communication of diverse specialists...Николаенко, Г. А., Малюшкин, Р. В., & Самокиш, А. В. (2020). Global Distribution of Digital Scientific Communication: Сase of ASNS ResearchGate. Социология науки и технологий, 11(3), 158-178.

very confused!

… Another criticism was that some users faked data about their publications in order to inflate their RG score and that ResearchGate had no measures in place to identify this ...Meier, A., & Tunger, D. (2018). Survey on opinions and usage patterns for the ResearchGate platform. Plos one, 13(10), e0204945.

I have confused and unable to understand their conditions for increasing or decreasing of RI and RG score.

different weightages on Q n A...69% was due to the influence of the answers and 31% to the influence of the questions...Meier, A., & Tunger, D. (2018). Investigating the transparency and influenceability of altmetrics using the example of the RG score and the ResearchGate platform. Information Services & Use, 38(1-2), 99-110.

I am not clear about the procedure of calculating RG score and research interest used by Researchgate.

Dear D A Gayan Nayanajith,

This is an interesting point. To answer this question, the algorithm for calculating the total research interest should be precisely defined. This algorithm is one of the most distinctive and peculiar features of a specific scientific portal that also has the characteristics of a social networking site. Other scientific portals similar to RG may have different formulas for this algorithm. But for many different reasons, the Research Gate portal is appreciated by millions of researchers and scientists around the world and is developing the fastest.

Best regards,

Dariusz Prokopowicz

I am yet to understand the intricacies and complexities of calculations of the coveted RG Score. My humble submission.

...ResearchGate has launched its own citation index by extracting citations from documents uploaded to the site and reporting citation counts on article profile pages. Since authors may upload preprints to ResearchGate, it may use these to provide early impact evidence...Thelwall, M., & Kousha, K. (2017). ResearchGate versus Google Scholar: Which finds more early citations?. Scientometrics, 112(2), 1125-1131.

...scientific productivity....projects and updates...Noncent, D., Pierre, A., Garçon, J., & Emmanuel, E. (2020). Measuring the scientific productivity of UniQ researchers on ResearchGate (July 24, 2020). Report number: RG-report-007. Port-au-Prince: Université Quisqueya.

...Despite the increase in the number of institutional repositories worldwide, most of them seem underpopulated. At the same time, scientists are apparently willing to share copies of their publications on academic social networking sites....Borrego, Á. (2017). Institutional repositories versus ResearchGate: The depositing habits of Spanish researchers. Learned publishing, 30(3), 185-192.

Type of contribution...No research items and other contributions...Mason, S. (2020). Adoption and usage of Academic Social Networks: a Japan case study. Scientometrics, 122(3), 1751-1767.

This is question is common for all. RG should follow clear cut and transparent policy for calculating RG score.

Should shud be updated available to everyone.

ResearchGate score is more relevant to number of publications than to citations impact. The ResearchGate score should not be used to compare institutions on research quality …Iatsyshyn, A. V., Popov, O. O., Kovach, V. O., Iatsyshyn, A. V., Artemchuk, V. O., Radchenko, O. O., ... & Kovalenko, V. V. (2021, March). Formation of the scientist image in modern conditions of digital society transformation. In Journal of Physics: Conference Series (Vol. 1840, No. 1, p. 012039). IOP Publishing.

...the extent to which a good RG score can be achieved by investing a little time in order to become established as a real academic on ResearchGate....Meier, A., & Tunger, D. (2018). Investigating the transparency and influenceability of altmetrics using the example of the RG score and the ResearchGate platform. Information Services & Use, 38(1-2), 99-110.

frequent updates of profiles with new content...rights are reserved by Aamir, A., & Al Mosawi, J. (2020). Scientific productivity of influential pediatricians from ten Arab countries: Researchgate analysis. Can J Biomed Res & Tech, 2(4).

Reads Vs full text reads...recent change in the information shown on each researcher's profile page, which now discloses the number of full-text reads...Copiello, S., & Bonifaci, P. (2019). ResearchGate Score, full-text research items, and full-text reads: a follow-up study. Scientometrics, 119(2), 1255-1262.

...According to Martin-Martin et al. (2016) lack of transparency in its indicators is one of the disadvantages of RG …Jamali, H. R. (2017). Copyright compliance and infringement in ResearchGate full-text journal articles. Scientometrics, 112(1), 241-254.

...Platform engagement over publications and citations...Orduna-Malea, E., Martín-Martín, A., Thelwall, M., & López-Cózar, E. D. (2017). The ResearchGate Score rewards academics' active participation on the platform above their publications and citations. Impact of Social Sciences Blog.

...RG is dominated by recent articles, which attract about three times as many views as older articles. ResearchGate has uneven coverage of scholarship, with the arts and humanities, health professions, and decision sciences poorly represented and some fields receiving twice as many views per article as others...Thelwall, M., & Kousha, K. (2017). ResearchGate articles: Age, discipline, audience size, and impact. Journal of the Association for information Science and technology, 68(2), 468-479.

...Where RG really scores is that, like any social media platform, it locks the member in real-time engagement. The RG Score acknowledges the fact that reputation is, in its essence, social and collaborative; however, it struggles with the deployment of engagement metrics. ResearchGate has the potential to upset the reputational applecart by becoming a major deliverer of scholarly reputation but is not there yet...Following up on arguments presented by Kraker and Lex (2015), Jordan (2015) reports on an analysis of RG scores, which examined correlations between the score and profile metrics. Results underscore the shortcomings of the RG Score, as described by Kraker and Lex (2015), leading them to conclude that whilst the aim of the RG Score as a composite metric that takes into account social interactions and reputation, alongside traditional publication-based metrics, is a desirable one, there are limitations to the extent that this can be realized....Nicholas, D., Clark, D., & Herman, E. (2016). ResearchGate: reputation uncovered. Learned Publishing, 29(3), 173-182.

...many of the users’ threads were responded to by other new users, ResearchGate shows a general atmosphere of welcomed participation and low barriers to new users. There are not any clear barriers presented to new users, unlike in the previous literature. New users did not receive much feedback on their initial contributions to the platform, but often did not create more than one post. This leads to a high turnover rate of scholars on ResearchGate. This may be due to platform differences: whereas users of Wikipedia (B. Choi et al., 2010; Farzan & Han, 2014), Slashdot (Lampe & Johnston, 2005) or Facebook (Burke et al., 2009) expect a certain input from new members, a scholarly Q&A platform has unclear expectations and no expectation of conformity to group norms. Lacking this input of what was valuable content, scholars were not incentivized to return to any of ResearchGate's informal communication systems...Goodwin, S., Jeng, W., & He, D. (2014). Changing communication on ResearchGate through interface updates. Proceedings of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 51(1), 1-4.

...results of our investigation show that activity in social networks appears to have a great impact on the RG score and can strategically and selectively influence this result. Furthermore, we succeeded in entering publications by other authors as our own, thus dramatically improving our RG score. On the whole, with a little effort and without any academic publications of our own we were able to achieve an RG score which was higher than almost half the scores of all ResearchGate users. This self-experiment should be interpreted as a pilot study and can be implemented in an expanded form in future....Meier, A., & Tunger, D. (2018). Investigating the transparency and influenceability of altmetrics using the example of the RG score and the ResearchGate platform. Information Services & Use, 38(1-2), 99-110.

....RG, as a relatively new and growing network of scientists nowadays even tags discussion contributions by the size of the newly developed RG score and journal impact factors and what have you, as if the correct opinion of a person with an “RG score” of 10 counts less than the opinion of a RG superstar with an RG score of, say, 40 or more. The mentioned RG Score, which really glares at you when you even log on to the Research Gate system, is an overall score of the ranking of scientists participating in the Research Gate system and is – upon closer inspection – seriously flawed and contradicts the established scientific ranking systems provided by other, much more respected sources... By wrongly labeling scientists in one category or the other with that RG blue arrow telling you that you are either at the top, at the miserable bottom or somewhere in the middle, it even could intervene in such processes as the negotiation of publishing contracts with publishers and potentially damages what the laws of many countries around the world nowadays with justification call “the credit worthiness” of a scientist...Tausch, A. (2014). Researchgate, RG-Scores, or a true Research Gate to Global Research? On the limits of the RG factor and some scientometric evidence on how the current RG score system discriminates against economic and social sciences and against the developing countries.

I think the RG score focuses on user engagement and interaction. Therefore, it is always convenient to look at the h index, which is also provided by RG in the score section.

Yes, there is a lot of disparity

...RG Score (research interest) does not measure the prestige of researchers, but instead their level of participation in the platform. According to Martin-Martin et al. (2016) lack of transparency in its indicators is one of the disadvantages of ResearchGate …Jamali, H. R. (2017). Copyright compliance and infringement in ResearchGate full-text journal articles. Scientometrics, 112(1), 241-254.

WELCOME CONTRIBUTIONS TO THIS THREAD...RG Score, is an overall score of the ranking of scientists participating in the Research Gate system and is – upon closer inspection – seriously flawed and contradicts the established scientific ranking systems provided by other, much more respected sources. By wrongly labeling scientists in one category or the other with that RG blue arrow telling you that you are either at the top, at the miserable bottom or somewhere in the middle, it even could intervene in such processes as the negotiation of publishing contracts with publishers and potentially damages what the laws of many countries around the world nowadays with justification call “the credit worthiness” of a scientist...Tausch, A. (2014). Researchgate, RG-Scores, or a true Research Gate to Global Research? On the limits of the RG factor and some scientometric evidence on how the current RG score system discriminates against economic and social sciences and against the developing countries.

… in both cases (RG score and the Research Interest score)serious questions have been raised about the legitimacy of the altmetric, due to a lack of transparency surrounding its calculation …Mason, S. (2020). Adoption and usage of Academic Social Networks: a Japan case study. Scientometrics, 122(3), 1751-1767.

Effects of research disciplines and degree of RG site activity...Academic Social Networking Sites (ASNSs) are increasingly used by scholars to create academic profiles, share research publications, and interact with peers, among many other functions. However, it remains unclear how factors such as discipline may affect the scholarly use of such sites....gathered data from a total of 77,902 users from 61 U.S. research universities at different research activity levels as defined by the Carnegie Classification of Institutions of Higher Education...The sample users were categorized into six groups based on their affiliated departmental discipline as stated on their RG profiles... The results show that user participation and RG use characteristics vary by discipline. In addition, users from higher research activity level universities tend to show better performance in RG metrics than their lower research activity level counterparts regardless of discipline... The findings of this study help ongoing efforts to better understand the use of ASNSs among researchers, assist researchers in effectively connecting and interacting with peers in their respective disciplines, and contribute to the discussion of ASNSs in the context of scholarly communication, altmetrics, and information behavior in research communities and higher education institutions....Yan, W., Zhang, Y., Hu, T., & Kudva, S. (2021). How does scholarly use of academic social networking sites differ by academic discipline? A case study using ResearchGate. Information Processing & Management, 58(1), 102430.

I think the growth must be balanced. If one parameter grows more than others, it causes loss more than benefits.

Reliability and manipulation of RG score related parameters… Another criticism was that some users faked data about their publications in order to inflate their RG score and that ResearchGate had no measures in place to identify this ...Meier, A., & Tunger, D. (2018). Survey on opinions and usage patterns for the ResearchGate platform. Plos one, 13(10), e0204945.

Some thoughts on 3 different aspects...views and critical reflections on peer review, bibliometrics and altmetrics against the background of the latest developments and critique of the scientific system (e.g., replication crisis, DORA, open science, data manipulation).... Peer review is the oldest form of monitoring the scientific process and research outcomes and is sometimes considered as the gold standard for evaluating quality. However, it also has its drawbacks; therefore, new forms of peer review are being explored. Bibliometrics, comparative statistics based on publication and citation counts, was introduced as a more objective evaluation method, which is applicable on meso and macro levels of research producing units but is not without problems either. Citation counts as a proxy of quality; the impact factor and the h-index are some of the most controversial subjects of research evaluation today. The newest addition to the evaluation toolbox are altmetrics, impact measures based mainly on social media activity. Altmetrics have pros and cons as well. None of the measuring devices is perfect, and rather than replacing they complement each other. By drawing on indicators from all three aspects of research evaluation, negative and adverse effects are limited...Bar-Ilan, J., Haustein, S., Milojević, S., Peters, I., & Wolfram, D. (2018). Peer review, bibliometrics and altmetrics—Do we need them all? Proceedings of the Association for Information Science and Technology, 55(1), 653–656. https://doi.org/10.1002/pra2.2018.14505501073.

Collaboration related outcomes towards RG Score/Research Interest...It was found that the international collaboration of the research team is positively associated with the presence of the first author on Academic Social Networking Sites (ASNSs) as ResearchGate and Academia.edu. Despite the fact that juniors are more likely to be present in SM platforms, the senior position of the first author was positively associated with the international collaboration, which can be explained by the fact that senior academics have accumulated more extensive bridging social capital. The identified relationship indicates that professional SM serves as a tool to establish a digital footprint not only in business but also in academia. As well as the need for further investigation of the role and potential of ASNSs to foster newer and more efficient forms of international research collaboration...Gorska, A., Korzynski, P., Mazurek, G., & Pucciarelli, F. (2020). The role of social media in scholarly collaboration: an enabler of international research team’s activation?. Journal of Global Information Technology Management, 23(4), 273-291.

WELCOME ALL CONTRIBUTIONS...Effect of social structure embedded in RG towards Research Interest...The goal of ResearchGate (RG) is to help users exchange scholarly information around the world... Adaptive structuration theory (AST) to investigate the social structure of RG, which had been largely overlooked by prior research...For the social structure embedded in RG, the most frequent updates of structural features and spirit occurred in the first two years. Six representative updates for information exchange were analyzed and the newly embedded social structures were presented. For the social structure emerging in using RG, users were more willing to answer questions than ask questions, which countered intuition. Three categories were elicited to present the purpose and expectation of questions. Users were more willing to publish publications than publish projects. Compared with reading publications and projects published by others, users seldom commented on them....

Hi D A Gayan Nayanajith I find RG's assessment of research interest to be very haphazard and is not particularly useful as a measure of real interest. It might be easier if they identified clearly how they arrived at their scores, but I suppose equally RG would be concerned that armed with this information some people would 'game' the system. I don't take the score terribly seriously and use it more as a guide.

All my very best wishes, James.

I agree with Dr. Syed Alamdar Ali Shah that the disparities is related to researchers' activity in the parameters specified by RG, especially Citations, the impact factor of research and journal in which it was published.

...RG Score, really glares at you when you even log on to the RG system. RGS is an overall score of the ranking of scientists participating in the RG system and is – upon closer inspection – seriously flawed and contradicts the established scientific ranking systems provided by other, much more respected sources. By wrongly labeling scientists in one category or the other with that RG blue arrow telling you that you are either at the top, at the miserable bottom or somewhere in the middle, it even could intervene in such processes as the negotiation of publishing contracts with publishers and potentially damages what the laws of many countries around the world nowadays with justification call “the credit worthiness” of a scientist...Tausch, A. (2014). Researchgate, RG-Scores, or a true Research Gate to Global Research? On the limits of the RG factor and some scientometric evidence on how the current RG score system discriminates against economic and social sciences and against the developing countries.

The parameters are decided by the RG board, as you know.

Discussing it further is of little use, in my opinion.