I see many social network websites are rating academic institutions as is the case of research-gate. In your view there is a need to include this rating as one of the parameter for the process of accreditation with due weight. Since these rating are based on scientific contributions of the academic staff of the institutions. If your answer is yes. please indicate which social network is best for the purpose.
Social network rating systems are currently too arbitrary to be of much use to promotion and tenure committees, department heads and deans.
However, in showing impact, these networks are useful as one factor in an index of multiple measures. For example, college admissions are based on a student's grades, volunteering activities, jobs held, test scores, admissions essays and other factors. For accreditation, ResearchGate shows promise in that it is a one-stop-shop for viewing academic output of a faculty, where PDF's of their published work and other scholarly activities of their intellectual contributions can be viewed by an accreditation visiting team.
On the other hand, Researchgate is limited on its reporting of Impact Factors for scholarly journals (it reports for Thomson Reuters journals only), and therefore, does not accurately reflect the accuracy and totality of the Impact Factors of all the journals in which ResearchGate members have published their work; these are thousands of journals where Impact factors are not being reported.
Moreover, Google Scholar already reports the h-index for its members. The RG Score does not seem as accurate as the h-index in terms of its methodology and simplicity of the scoring formula. Therefore, both the RG Score and Google Scholar h-index combined could have some promise in aiding a team of deans during accreditation visits. But, for now, social network rating systems should not be the only factors in the decision criterion.
Thank you very much for excellent input. There is a possibility that these score will be used in future.
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