Research Gate is a great site for gathering intellectuals & scholars from all over the world. In the process of continuous learning, it added a lot for me. The (Q & A) section is very useful but it suffers from 2 problems: 1) Anonymous downvoting. 2) Abnormal upvoting.

The first problem can be solved by: (i) revealing the identity of the downvoter or  (ii) canceling the downvote if the downvoter does not give an explanation within 3 days on the same thread.

The second problem is more complex. There are few RG participants who made false RG accounts with just names without photos from certain institutes. The perpetrator, who has the names & passwords on a piece of paper, will write something and then gives himself a large number of upvotes. By this fraud, he hopes to get high RG score. This second problem can be solved if RG does not count upvotes coming from the institute or the country of the person who writes a contribution.

Dear Geng, I fully agree with the good spirit and attitude of your post. This ocular give RG a higher value than it already has. In any case, down voting is to provide arguments, at any cost.

Geng -

I agree that if the down-voting option were removed, and people only allowed to make their positions and arguments known, should they disagree, that would likely improve the scientific quality of time spent on ResearchGate, in my opinion.  Hopefully it would also help to discourage some of the bad behavior that may not be based on a scientific argument at all. 

Cheers - Jim

PS - And yes, I would be very happy never again to read an uncivil post!  There is no justification for personal attacks.

Research Gate is a great site for gathering intellectuals & scholars from all over the world. In the process of continuous learning, it added a lot for me. The (Q & A) section is very useful but it suffers from 2 problems: 1) Anonymous downvoting. 2) Abnormal upvoting.

The first problem can be solved by: (i) revealing the identity of the downvoter or  (ii) canceling the downvote if the downvoter does not give an explanation within 3 days on the same thread.

The second problem is more complex. There are few RG participants who made false RG accounts with just names without photos from certain institutes. The perpetrator, who has the names & passwords on a piece of paper, will write something and then gives himself a large number of upvotes. By this fraud, he hopes to get high RG score. This second problem can be solved if RG does not count upvotes coming from the institute or the country of the person who writes a contribution.

The narration could be ....I'm totally thankful to you for your attempt in answering the question but _________________

This could be better than a downvote, helps people to process over and articulate.

Surely, a frank and constuctive answer has more value than downvoting.

Dear Geng Ouyang

I fully agree with you

Dear Colleagues, happy new year and thank you for your kind and constructive points of view.

Idonot agree with downvoting it is more valuable to add your comment

Agreed down vote feature should be removed from RG & replaced with answers that the person doesn't agreed with the answers / question posed by others to state his / her points.  This is to facilitate learning from each others & for knowledge contribution instead of showing unproductive anonymous down vote gesture.

Think we had discussed many times on this but not sure RG is considering / taking positive action towards resolving this?

Or does anyone knows RG shares its point why down vote feature is required?

Agreed with Nizar's sharing on "abnormal upvoting" - does RG has a mechanism to detect & stop this unethical act?

I think all these up- and down-votes (questions, debates, ...) are somehow related to members looking for higher and higher RG scores. If RG scores were based on more realistic metrics (no. of followers, no. of publications, reads, citations, impact points, patents, no. of full-text requests responded, H-index, etc.) then no one was interested to read second hand, copy and paste, and truncated answers from Internet. Sometimes I see some of us are genius (professors in everything) and jump so quickly to provide the first answer (for getting up-vote!) whereas their RG profile is empty. As a result, we see less and less quality and original answers recently. No one seems interested to answer questions matching his/her expertise, but answering general questions! (e.g. what is day? what is night? what is science?, what is smile?, what is dream? ...) Why this is so? Because there would be no reward if you answer questions matching your expertise! but he/she get either down-vote or abstain!  On the other hand, for general and simple questions we get huge number of answers and we get lots of up-votes. To summarize, RG scoring algorithm need to be revised to reflect to true values and quality of resources as in H-index, G-index, Scopus, etc. Till then this sort of questions will be asked again and again.

Happy New Year!

Maybe next year we do better.

Dear Colleagues:

I think an alternative solution to the downvoting problem may be to present the downvoter, when he/she makes click on the button, a number of response options .For example, "poor response", "wrong answer" , etc, plus the optional possibility of including a more detailed explanation.. The downvoter should select an option for his/her vote to be accepted. The vote would remain anonymous .

It is frustrated, when you write a detailed answer from your experience, and then you got a anonymous downvoting without any explanation. However, seeing upvotings from respective experts will reduce this frustration. 

Thank you for sharing this important topic. 

I think down voting system should not be part of RG score. If you down vote to some answers or explanation you don't give the reasons why you have down voted the particular answer. It discourage the researchers attempt to answering the particular question.