A reproduction of what you can find on the website of RG
How Research Interest is calculated
Through our research and input from scientists, we decided to focus on how ResearchGate members are showing interest in individual research items and how that interest is evolving over time. We believe that this new score can give authors a faster, more comprehensive picture than citations or reads alone.We built the Research Interest score to be intuitive, so that researchers can quickly understand and use it in as many situations as possible. This score is focused on research items and scientists' interactions with them, using concepts that are familiar to our members. To provide an overview of a researcher's body of work, we've also added a Total Research Interest score, which simply adds up the Research Interest scores from all of an author's research items.
What the Research Interest score includes
When researchers read, recommend or cite a research item, its Research Interest goes up. Based on our data and feedback from scientists, we chose to focus on these interactions to reflect the lifecycle of a scientist's increasing interest in a piece of research. First, a researcher accesses a research item. If it sounds of interest, they will read the full-text. If they like what they read, they might recommend it. And if the work is really relevant, they might cite it in their own research.This is how we decided on a system for weighting the different forms of interaction:
- A read has a weighting of 1.
- A full-text read has a weighting of 3.
- A recommendation has a weighting of 5.
- A citation has a weighting of 10.
What the Research Interest score doesn't include
To make Research Interest meaningful to our members, we decided to exclude certain types of data:
- Reads by people who are not ResearchGate members Measuring interest from the scientists on ResearchGate allows us to provide the 'who' behind the metrics, which we feel is a unique value for authors in understanding how their work is received.
- Multiple reads and recommendations by a researcher in a single week A researcher interacting multiple times with the same research within a short period of time doesn't represent an increase in interest, but leaves the score more open to abuse.
- Interactions from bots, crawlers and other automated systems Our automated bot detection system is constantly monitoring abnormalities so that we can react quickly to any fraudulent activity. You can also send feedback to our support team if you suspect any unusual activity in your stats.
- Badges
- Science topic