Recently someone observed that by adding a research paper his ResearchGate (RG) score increases only 0.03, while by adding a comment like "thank you", his RG increase 0.3, and he concluded based on the observation that RG is useless. My question is, is it a wrong way of thinking?
Apparently, if the observation correct, RG encourages more comments than papers. However, naively people tend to think a paper deserves a higher score than a simple comment. This is a typical head-dominated thinking, i.e., a paper is more important than a comment. However, RG or social media in general is based on tail-dominated thinking, i.e., collectively the tail is far more important than the head, although individuals in the head are far more important than individuals in the tail. For the head/tail breaks thinking, one can refer to slides 26, 27 and 28 of this presentation: Presentation A Geospatial Perspective on Sustainable Urban Mobility in th...
The head/tail breaks thinking is, to a great extent, the same as the Wisdom of Crowds thinking: the heterogeneous many (ordinary people) are often smarter than the few (experts)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wisdom_of_Crowds
The Wisdom of Crowds thinking can explain why head/tail breaks can be used to effectively derive natural cities (Section 5 in particular):
Article The Evolution of Natural Cities from the Perspective of Loca...
https://www.technologyreview.com/s/524381/natural-cities-emerge-from-social-media-location-data/
It is really interesting.
As I know, adding a conference paper has zero impact on the RG score.
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