At first, I thought the interest score should be a valuable metric, but the problem is, there are many researchers that have very high scores, but they don't actually write many papers. They are invited to work on a paper with a team of hundreds. Thus, their name appears on tens if not many tens of publications per year.
By example, if there are 100 researchers, then the researcher should get 1/100 of a score when compared to a single author paper. A ranking adjustment should be considered as well. But in the end, if you don't factor the number of researchers into the score, then you have crazy rankings that are simply irrelevant.
Thoughts on factors to consider are invited.
Hi Jody. When I started on RG, we only had RG score and no research interest score. At first, I wasn't very concerned about scores, since my research was to facilitate the learning of my students. I began at 0.0 score. Then many of my papers were rejected by certain journals. The papers were fine. So I began to wonder if editors had been seeing that I was a beginning researcher with 0 citations at that time. Then, citations and scores began to matter. But I sent those papers after editing to improve them to other journals, and they were accepted. Soon I had self-citations and citations. And scores faded somewhat in importance. The important thing is that our research has been of use to others. Thanks.
Wolfgang H. Muss Jody A Geiger
All parameters/scores/indexes, including the number of citations, correlate with the number of authors. There are very different practices in different field. In social sciences, there is often only one author, in high-energy physics up to several thousand co-authors. Therefore it is not possible to compare the publication scores for different fields of science.
See also this discussion: https://www.researchgate.net/post/What_do_you_think_about_multiple_author_papers
The linked discussion relates to the value of multi-author papers, but not related to the interest score. This is valuable to understand, but returning to the original question.
When an author acquires a score of 10,000, compared to another score of say 10, this somehow implies that the higher score author is producing research 1,000 times more valuable or interesting to the community. This is simply not true. That's like valuing research more just because the author works at a prestigious university.
Research has value because of the research and the interest score is a social gauge that assists other researchers to filter or assign quality as a function of those daring individuals that invested the time to blindly investigate it themselves. It follows that the score has to be an accurate indicator of the likelihood of insightful research, not a popularity rating.
The RG scores are inventions by RG and are not recognized outside RG. The only score which is used widely are citation counts, weighted by "impact factors" of journcals, e.g. the Hirsh (or h) index. However, its value depends on how complete the used data on citations is. And in general, the citations are also not an objective criterion, because their number depends on the number of authors, the journal in which the paper was published, the field of science etc. Research fields with thousands of researchers (like cell biology or particle physics) produce much more papers and much more citations than "small" fields (e.g., Assyriology or even more exotic ones), with a few dozens of researchers. Therefore I am very sceptical about these impact factors of journals, h indexes etc. At least one cannot find an absolute factor to compare all journals and all reasearchers, it is like comparing apples with pears. An the number of citations or the number of "Reads" in RG are not necessarily an expression high quality and high scientific value. They are statistical values and show tendencies, but they do not say so much about individual cases.
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