I wish RG will start using some sort of artificial intelligence at their website that would filter answers like "following" and similar information noise, and prevent those messages from appearing.

Dear Yurii,

First of all thank you for starting this thread! Let's see, how many "following" will appear... :-(

Of course this behaviour is very annoying and, on the other hand, it is surprising, as it is not a proper researcher's behaviour. (Can't they find the button for that...?)

You also ask about "I agree with..." type answers. I have more understanding in this case. IMHO this is a valid expression of opinion. Of course it would be better if the person could add something to the debate, but many people have difficulties expressing their views properly in English (maybe I also belong to this category :-) ) .If someone has formulated an opinion that I share, I think it is acceptable to say I agree with XY, especially if there are opposing ideas in the thread.

If we could get rid the "following"-effect, RG would be a more useful discussion forum...

Thank you and kind regards, Balázs

I wish RG will start using some sort of artificial intelligence at their website that would filter answers like "following" and similar information noise, and prevent those messages from appearing.

Another thought after seeing some posts and a shower of recommendations in the "Scholars having RG score above 100" thread.

When I see one-word comments like following, interesting, agree ..., I remember a story I read about Alexandre Dumas - when he was writing his famous Three Musketeers, he was paid per line. Then he introduced a character in his novel, who was not very talkative, mostly answering “yes”, “no”, "don’t know”, and so on.

Not sure if this story is true, but perhaps we should not be very critical to those participants who are very laconic in their comments. After all, they are following the steps of the greatest, aren't they ?

I personnaly have difficulties expressing my thoughts in english (je préfère m'exprimer en français ) but I try hard to express my ideas. Just like I said before in the other post about RG score and stats, this must not be an issue for a scientist. We are all here to share knowledge and expertise. People may sometimes write "following" in a discussion just to have the opportunity to get the latest answers in a discussion they want To follow.

Chere Safia Belhadj

Je bien comprend Francais. English is not my mother language as well. I think that if you want to follow the question you need just click the icon "follow" and your name appears in the list of followers.

I have seen a lot of this "following" but usually by "researchers" who appear to be new to the forum and haven't quite figured out what "following" means. Given the way you asked the question It wil be interesting to see if you get many "following" comments.

Cher Yurii, @Yurii V Geletii

Merci beaucoup pour votre réponse. Alors, partageons ce qui nous unit le plus, la connaissance et la science. A très bientôt.

The concept of "following" is borrowed from Facebook. People write "following" to track the post in a group or a forum. It may not be as sinister as suggested - to increase RG score. I still do not know if RG score is beneficial in any way. It is obviously annoying to see "following" as an answer because there is a very obvious tab for that.

As I learned recently, in some countries dumb "scientific" supervisors use RG score as a measure or scientific achievements (and really, how stupid should be such a supervisor to apply RG score for such a task!). And their underlings happily employ cheating (posting dumb posts like "follow", "interesting" and so on, in attempt to increase their RG score). Cheating scientist is a bad thing, cheating scientific community is terrible, both for country and for all of us.

So, now talking about corruption in scientific community. If RG does not stop to display RG score and any ranking data corruption will continue to flourish. Interestingly, corruption concentrates in certain countries (easy to see by affiliations of cheaters), where scientific tradition still pretty young. Isn't it a time to stop spreading cheating culture?

Chère Safia Belhadj, pas de probléme. Il y a des collègues ici qui comprennent français aussi, et je pense quelque mots en français ce n'est pas de problème, ça va. But the working language is anyhow English.

Cordialement, Balázs

Vladimir Dusevich wrote "Interestingly, corruption concentrates in certain countries (easy to see by affiliations of cheaters), where scientific tradition still pretty young. Isn't it a time to stop spreading cheating culture? "

Dear Vladimir, That is quite an uneducated statement. A quick look at Retraction Watch (https://retractionwatch.com/2014/05/15/which-countries-have-the-most-retractions-for-which-reasons/) will show new and older cultures (acquainted with sciences) are equally corrupt :-). Long time ago, my teacher had remarked that where you will go, faces will change but the people will remain the same. I did not find any exception so far in four very different countries. Good and bad people exist everywhere. As the to scientific tradition being "pretty young", thousands of years ago, cultures in central Asia, India, Iraq, Iran, were centers of philosophy and education. The term "algorithm" and "algebra" is derived from the works of Arab mathematicians. Now such cultures may not be as advanced as the rest. The ups and downs of cultures is a natural phenomenon, perhaps cyclic, and will continue to happen in the future as well. China is the latest example of an emerging superpower, both economically and scientifically. In the same vein, isn't it a time to stop spreading stereoptyping?

M. Farooq Wahab The number of retraction is not related to corruption. I co-authored one paper which has been retracted. This was our own decision since the data were misinterpreted, while correct. We felt that it was our big mistake and we admit it by the retracting the paper. This was an act of admitting our fault. The goal was to keep the highest level in the field. I agree with Vladimir Dusevich that the scientific traditions are extremely important. It's time to stop spreading scientific misbehavior regardless of country. We are all equal and must obey the same rules. When I review a paper, I don't care about the place where the research was performed. But I care about the scientific level of the paper.

Yurii V Geletii I fully respect retraction in case of author's decision. I have made scientific mistakes as well. A survey of statistical data will show you that almost all papers have some level of mistakes (formulae, wrong assumptions, incorrectly executed experiments etc.). I can give plenty of examples but this not the point. The point is in continuously improving oneself, which we should all keep trying. However, please read the causes of retraction. It is usually plagiarism, doctoring of data. These things are rampant, regardless of culture. It may be caught and it may not be caught. This was the point and this is indeed a reflection of corruption. So people should not show an air of self-righteousness around them and teach others that only certain countries have cheaters and rest are heavenly angels :-)

M. Farooq Wahab . Our discussion shifted to semantic. I guess you would agree with the following: "The reason of retraction may indicate the level of corruption."

But this is not the focus of this discussion. What to do with posts like "following." I call them "scam", Vladimir Dusevich calls them "cheating. They are useless, incompetent, annoying, etc. How to discourage such postings in RG forum

@Vladimir Dusevich , If you are correct and " dumb "scientific" supervisors use RG score as a measure or scientific achievement" you can't blame the students for exploring ways to improve RG score. They are just doing what they were assigned to do. Maybe one of them will actually figure out how RG scores are calculated and tell the rest of us.

Yurii V Geletii , There is no data which shows that writing "following" in a RG post correlates with a cheating or a scammer's mindset. As noted above by another person, this is usually done by people who are new to RG (and a Facebook tradition). Some people treat Linkedin like Facebook. What can we do about their ignorance? The previous discussion on retraction is not an issue of semantics, it a mindset of certain self-righteous people or a society- especially when they attempt to point out "certain countries" have cheaters. This is only point of disagreement. Scientific dishonesty is quite common even in developed countries - accept it. On the other hand scientific mistakes are rampant too in published works but that does not mean those people are cheaters as well. I wrote an educational article on history of terminology and added a paragraph on the practice of accepting scientific mistakes by a big respected scientist. It was an integration mistake.

Article The Ultimate Limit in Measurements by Instrumental Analysis:...

The issue of tackling "following" on RG is just are like arguing "How many angels can stand on the head of a pin?" There is no right or wrong answer. Yes, it is very annoying to see following as a reply, but please don't label them cheaters or scammers as a generalization or perhaps endorse others who call them cheaters. RG should figure out a way to automatically remove this word or a reply which is less than a certain word count. StackExchange has very strict rules and it is a pretty decent forum. RG can learn from that.

Dear @ M. Farooq Wahab , those posting "follow" are cheaters. Why are you defending them? And why you have tried to distort my worlds? You tried to say that in my opinion people from some countries are not as good as people from other countries... Not good, not good at all. How come? Does the ends (supporting cheaters) justify the means?

Just in case I repeat: scientific supervises in some countries are creating cheating culture in their scientific communities with the help of RG score. RG score should be abandoned.

In the not-so-far past, the RG score was affected by recommendations (resp. "upvoting") of answers given, not on the number of answers itself. (My own analysis - as RG did not give away how the score was computed.)

Currently I'm not sure, but might still be similar.

Thus cheating by "following" will not work unless somebody recommends this annoying nonsense.

Might be RG should publish a bit about their scoring system with respect to ow answers are rated. Although you cannot prevent cheating completely. Such is the world...

RG score is public and anyone can see the contributing elements score, whether it is mainly from answers or publications. This is quite useful in cases where the individual's score is quite inflated (above 100 or so). Again, there is nothing to gain without having any statistical data about the utility of RG scores in promotions or financial gains. Innocent until proven guilty is an old adage.

Dear Vladimir Dusevich you wrote " Interestingly, corruption concentrates in certain countries (easy to see by affiliations of cheaters), where scientific tradition still pretty young. Isn't it a time to stop spreading cheating culture? ". Sorry, nobody distorted your words. All I wished to point out that there is no need to make sweeping statements and stereotyping "countries" by the actions of 4-5 individuals. That is not good. And please don't claim scientific self-righteousness and corruption being concentrated in certain places. It will be behaving like ostriches (http://sitn.hms.harvard.edu/flash/2013/house-of-cards-is-something-wrong-with-the-state-of-science/). Please share any scientific data about those who happen to write "following" are cheaters. Also it would be interesting to have statistical data as how people gain any advantage from RG scores in those "certain" countries? I wish one could avail something out of RG numbers- as if someone cares.

Now this explains to me why I saw someone posted as following the topics, and his RG score is more than 100!!!!!!!!!

You can come across threads pestered with cheaters. They post "following" (and such) and give likes (recommendations) to each other for such posts. Disgusting. RG score should be removed without any replacement.

I would like to pay your attention to "recommendations." I agree with Vladimir Dusevich that the value of recommendations is now discredited. I found in several threads that some people recommend almost all posts. In addition they recommend the post in which the people thanks them. I think this is not ethical.

Yuri, There are no posted rules about recommendation etiquette. Some people are generous with recommendation and some are stingy. I have only created 1 discussion but I recommended every reasonable reply I have no idea if that is proper or not because there are no rules.

Rick,

I understand very well that there are no generally accepted rules on recommendations. I think that the generous recommendations discredit the values of recommendation. What is the reason to recommend a post like "following," "interesting, " etc. In some threads there are thousands of "recommendations. " I saw some people recommend almost all posts including related to themselves. How would you feel if you thank me for my comments of your post and I recommend this thanks. This is at least not ethical. The recommendations should be an appreciation of a significant contribution. Therefore, I consider the generosity in recommendations as a creation of information noise. I can't rule out that it could also increase the RG score

Yuri,

Most of the inner workings of Researchgate are a mystery to me - especially RG score. I suspect the site is constantly changing the way RG score is calculated in with the goal of maximizing participation - not necessarily rewarding frequent posters or quality of research items.

I have found a few young researchers here that somehow got lost and needed to be shown the right direction on their projects. I think their fellow students/instructors should be the first choice for giving this type of guidance but I am happy to help if/when I can. For me this is the primary purpose of this site.

There seem to be a subset of users who do odd things like post “follow” for reasons I do not understand. Some of them undoubtedly observed others doing it and figured it was the right thing to do, others are probably trying to game the system in some way –perhaps because their instructors grade them based on RG score

My philosophy is to only worry about what I can control. I can’t control RG scores or what people do to inflate them and others having higher scores than me harm me in any way so I don’t worry about it.

Rick,

I agree with you. Two sorts of people participate in the forum. I guess that the majority are scholars discussing really scientific questions. The quality of questions varies in a wide range. I like highly professional discussions as well as I like to help people having problems. The minority of participants make the forum irritating either by posting "following" or asking elementary (often stupid) questions. Sometimes this makes me very angry and I use the ironic language or the language of sarcasm to discourage misuse of the forum.

Interestingly, I have just found another brilliant answer in the reply to the question posted by a RG member: "I have no idea". And guess what - it already has one recommendation, perhaps given for the disarming honesty ...

If RG sets a minimum word limit for a response, then most of these problems can be minimized. My question is still, what is the advantage of anyone having a good or bad RG score? Has it helped anyone in promotions? Every score has a problem, for example, h- index, can be elevated because it is proportional to the person's age, or self citation ( it can be corrected for self citation). Some journsl editors promote citing their own journal references in which the article is submitted.

It's disingenuous to contribute vaguely or ambiguously to a question just in order to get tagged and score RG points. It goes a long way to show that some folks here are more interested in the superfluous than in the substantial... . However, I refrain myself from judging anyone because I don't want to be judged :). RG is fun and the interactions are worthwhile. That's more important. Congratulations to the high-scorers and aspiring high-scorers!

Following your explanation, I agree with you that Recommend is the appropriate action.

The algorithm in RG should be able to detect such actions. If not, then they need to improve their algorithms. It is normal for people to "game" the system.

Hazrat Ali (A.S.) said: Fear the sins that you commit in secret, because the Witness of those sins is the Judge Himself.

There would seem to be three possible responses, as well as combinations thereof, to a Question:

(1) An informed discussion that tries to Answer the Question;

(2) A virtual non-response, such as "Following", "Yes", "Agreed", and so on;

(3) Recommendation.

The first two options would seem to be recorded by RG as an Answer, whereas the third would not, so that the respondent would seem to gain nothing.