I suspect it would have zero impact on things like citations. It's more of a facebook-linkedin hybrid aimed at scientists, along with some discussion of science-related topics. While this can be interesting and/or useful, I don't think that there are many cases where this kind of interaction is likely to make someone aware of research that's close enough to their work that they would want to cite it that they didn't already know about (or wouldn't have found out about in the course of working in that area).

If I were looking for work related to my experiments or publications, Researchgate wouldn't be in the top 10 places I'd go to look, and might make it into the top 20 only because I'm not sure I could come up with 20. Maybe it could become something with more high-level scientific discussions and resources, but Researchgate seems focused almost entirely on keeping people coming back by adding any junk they can find on the web to your publications and spamming you with updates for your profile and those of the people you're following.

Thanks for the answer John! However I disagree with you in some points... I think that the impact of joining RG on citations may be small, but not zero. There are studies pointing for a positive and significant correlation between the number of times that an article (in pdf) is downloaded with the citations it receives. So, since RG (or other similar network) opens a new way to expose the pdf version of an article to the possibility to be downloaded, it probably will result in some citations. I agree with you that for a senior scientist, with huge publication numbers, the impact of RG on citations may be quite small or practically zero. However, major of RG participants are young graduate students or newly doctors. Such public may consider RG as a source of new references for their first indexed publications, PhD thesis, etc... With respect the spams, I totally agree with you! It is very boring...

That's certainly a possible effect, although my first guess is that interesting looking papers get both cited and downloaded more, rather than RG downloads having noticeable impact on citations. My take (and this will, of course, vary by field) is that the people who would download the article through RG either wouldn't be citing it or would have found it elsewhere if not here. But in some areas, exposure as an individual researcher may get people to look at your work more in the future, which could help citations. I just doubt that it would be a significant effect, at least the way things are currently set up.

Do you think people only participate on ResearchGate to game their score? Are people actually collaborating here?

I don't think most people worry much about their score, but most of the interaction I've seen has been more work-related social networking than scientific collaboration. It's certainly possible that it could move in that direction, or that it's already there for some communities, but that hasn't been my experience.

Researchgate itself seems to be focused on getting eyeballs, through copying lots of things that are done on facebook, linkedin, and other similar social and semi-social sites. I haven't seen any sign that they are focused on providing collaboration tools that would be useful. Of course, as with most such things, you get users first so that people know the site and then you provide tools to make it worthwhile to stay and use the site. But so far, they seem to be in the 'spread the word' and 'rope you in' phase.

Maybe participating in RG will not increase the number of citations much (it is not easy to determine, anyway, why people cited a certain paper: if they found it on RG or elsewhere) but it can be useful for finding new co-operation partners: recently I have found two people on RG whom I have never met but who could maybe provide me with the data I need, thus maybe we can write something together in the future. This is more valuable for me than the RG score.

Tiia

I agree with you completely.

Therefore, continuing the thought, I would say, that the our core activity on the ResearchGATE should not be only the meticulous adding of subsequent items to the list of publications, but active involvement of the extent of its competence, to exchange views on this portal. I think only then will be achieved one of the objectives set by the founders of this website, namely, bring together the various scientific communities and to create them a platform to cooperate.

Seriously, how we use (and how we will use) the activity on the ResearchGate, it depends on us.

Hi Walter, Its hard to see through what mechanism ResearchGate can increase citations. Potentially uploading pre/post prints will increase the visibility of your work because it will be downloaded more than if it wasn't available. That would be true of a number of repositories, and as has been pointed out, there are other institutional and subject repositories that might be more productive as they address a specific audience. The connection between downloads and citation I would say is tenuous, the reasons for citation are very specific to the topic and the researcher. Availability isn't a reason to cite something and there are better discovery tools to find relevant papers than ResaerchGate.

I use ResearchGate because I no longer have access to a repository and using a tool like ResearchGate is better than anything I could achieve as a "personal web page". The download statistics are gratifying but I don't think significant. I also wonder if it is a misconception of the value of ResearchGate to be too instrumental. That is, if I use a networking site this will happen. I hesitate to say this but I enjoy the discussions on ResearchGate and meeting people who I could not possibly meet in any other forum. The chances of a collaboration on any topic I am interested in are very low, but possibly fractionally higher for being here. BW Matt

I believe that the move RG statistics on the number of downloads, profile views, answers to questions, asking questions. In my view, the indicators show the activity of each participant in the scientific world, eg RG seems to me an excellent score factor evolution of academic and scientific role.