ResearchGate does a pretty good job of tracking publication analytics such as reads and citations over time. The recommendations feature can also be an interesting indicator for a publication's resonance with the scholarly community.
This progress allow for ideas to be developed about how to make the analytics features even better in the future. Here are some ideas I have been thinking about:
- something equivalent to Altmetric that tracks social media mentions across multiple platforms and mentions in news articles, conference proceedings, etc.
- more longitudinal data for individual publications by month and year
- the ability to compare the performance of one's own publications, with perhaps a way to rank them in analytic reports by reads, citations, etc.
- More specific analytics to allow for comparisons within and between departments on an individual and collective basis, which can be sorted by discipline, field, etc.
Are there any additional analytics features that you would like to see on ResearchGate?
I agree that the analytics are fun to look at sometimes, however they are clearly biased for various reasons and seem to be mostly driven by various types of superfluous engagement rather than overall impact. Of course ResearchGate is a social media platform and should be treated as such. The issue is that by further analyzing overinflated values the perceived importance of these values will be further overinflated. Some publications have hundreds of recommendations yet very few, if any, citations, while others have hundreds of citations with very few recommendations. Being more concerned of the metrics of your research rather than creating new scientific value is not likely to drive any type of meaningful progress.
That's a fair point. I am interested metrics like reads because my research focuses on student government and I have noticed that a lot of my readers appear to be students. These students may not yet be publishing academic works or they may be in a different discipline, but even though they are not formally citing the publications in journals, they may be using them to help with student government activities in practice. Keeping an eye on reads and the countries where the readers are may give indications about new student-led initiatives that are emerging. I'm curious about what the potential impacts could be and how this may correspond with changes in metrics like reads over time.