I HATE the new (timeline) format ... ewwwwwwww!

I HATE the new (timeline) format ... ewwwwwwww!

Dear Bob, of course I share your opinion. For us it is clearly not useful and we consider it as a big step back. But there must be a reason why many people, including RG managers think that this is a good move. They did not even ask the users about that, so for them the superiority of Timeline is obvious.CBists say it is terrible, TLers think that is is great. How is this contrast in opinions possible? I really want to understand...

Dear Balazs, thanks for this question. Being also a CBist I can fully understand your issues with the new timeline compared to the former contributions list, which was however also not perfect due to the lack of complete references. I would prefer just a "usual" list of the publications of a researcher, chronologically ordered as default, but with a function to order it according to reads and citations (as it was implemented ayear or so before). For me the question is whether RG gave any reasons or arguments for substituting the contribution list by a facebook-like timeline ? Do you have information about that?

To answer your question: In fact I suppose that younger, early stage career scientists have less issues with the timeline, since their list of publications and hence their timeline is rather short at the beginning. But with growing publication activity they can watch their timeline growing as a result of their research progress and that might be more attractive for them than just an usual publication list. And as a small concession to us older researchers, RG provides a list for the full text articles. But I am really curious which answers you will get both by CBists and TLers. 

Roland, a great comment, thank you!

@ Balázs Székely said: "But there must be a reason why ..."

The true answer is that the mission of the RG managers is to raise the capitalization value of their company, so the interface design changes they make are apparently those they feel will be most likely to appeal to most users (thereby increasing the numbers of users, but also the average time each user's eyes are on the site ... which is how value [i.e., advertising value] is calculated in the social-media world).

And, they clearly do their research, looking at other successful models (i.e., the timeline concept purloined from FaceBook) for ideas. The problem is they apparently don't realize that their population of users is quite-a-bit different in demographics than the FaceBook crowd (who tend to be younger "neomillennials"). If they bothered examining us (they clearly don't poll us or care about what our opinions might be of their changes, beforehand, always presenting the changes as a fait-accompli) they might see (which seems obvious to me) that the RG user population is much older than the average FaceBook population ... and as scientists, we also are more conservative and intolerant of changes (just for the sake of change) which bring us no additional benefits ... and we are particularly loathsome of changes that are made that INCONVENIENCE us, or cost us our valuable time, for no-other apparent reason than because the RG managers believe they will woo more users and ultimately enrich themselves. Isn't this the old trick of capitalists that Marx warned us about (causing our unnecessary work which they can sell to enrich themselves).

Please remember that whereas RG is currently free to users, RG is a FOR PROFIT corporation who is already seeking ways to capitalize on the site, and sooner-or-later, it will no longer be FREE (whether of cost or advertising ... doubtlessly advertising as that is the route to the big enrichment they doubtlessly seek ... dreaming of becoming the next mega-lucrative success like FaceBook).

There are many recent scholarly articles (use Google Scholar to locate a long list) on design concepts for social-media inferfaces ... following is the abstract of just one of them (which seems promising):

"Understanding how users behave when they connect to social networking sites creates opportunities for better interface design, richer studies of social interactions, and improved design of content distribution systems. In this paper, we present a first of a kind analysis of user workloads in online social networks. Our study is based on detailed clickstream data, collected over a 12-day period, summarizing HTTP sessions of 37,024 users who accessed four popular social networks: Orkut, MySpace, Hi5, and LinkedIn. The data were collected from a social network aggregator website in Brazil, which enables users to connect to multiple social networks with a single authentication. Our analysis of the clickstream data reveals key features of the social network workloads, such as how frequently people connect to social networks and for how long, as well as the types and sequences of activities that users conduct on these sites. Additionally, we crawled the social network topology of Orkut, so that we could analyze user interaction data in light of the social graph. Our data analysis suggests insights into how users interact with friends in Orkut, such as how frequently users visit their friends' or non-immediate friends' pages. In summary, our analysis demonstrates the power of using clickstream data in identifying patterns in social network workloads and social interactions. Our analysis shows that browsing, which cannot be inferred from crawling publicly available data, accounts for 92% of all user activities. Consequently, compared to using only crawled data, considering silent interactions like browsing friends' pages increases the measured level of interaction among users."

http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1644900

https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=social+media+user+interface+design&hl=en&as_sdt=0&as_vis=1&oi=scholart&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiWz5GFzqjMAhXDMz4KHcdJBm0QgQMIMzAA

 Balazs,

How appropriate the question! To many people in the world of technology static is bad: static means not moving forward; stuck in a rut; making no progress; boring sameness. It is like our desktop computers that the technological gurus of the digital world are adamant look and behave like our tablets and smart phones. The "Web sites that do not change do not grow" philosophy. Just when you get "familiar" with all the buttons and pull-downs, "Oops! Time to change!" Reminds me somewhat of grocery stores changing their layout every six months so that you buy more items while trying to find those for which you entered the store. It often is a question of "how far can we push it before they start complaining".

Web sites seem to "grow" in increments: never staying static for very long regardless of the wishes and desires of their users. Too much change, however, has caused several Web sites to revert back to the old pages once faced with tumultuous feedback from users. Let us hope the RG gets the message.

@ James said: "Just when you get familiar ... time to change ... reminds me ... of grocery stores changing their layout every six months so that you buy more items while trying to find those for which you entered the store ..."

Boy! You said a mouthful, there (and you got me so "smokin' mad' reminding me of my infuriating shopping experiences trying to track-down groceries at Wal-Mart that I need to go take another HBP pill before I pop-my-cork $$$#$!%#(%#$#$!#^&!$%@%! I shop-in-bulk for non-perishables, so I go so rarely, that the items I need are NEVER in the same place twice!

It is true that web-designers (in addition to the need to justify their continuance on the payroll) make frequent changes simply so that users will have to spend more time looking-around for what they came to find. The value of web-sites is a function of the how long your eyes spend on the pages: $ = n(eyes) x t

Bob,

The longer you spend on the Web page, the more likely you are to notice and possibly click on the advertisements. It is always a question of how far they can push the customer before they alienate (e.g. loose) the customer.

Ciao

Dear @Balázs, I like your introductory remarks. Of course, as you know, I belong to Contributionists. I do not like the feature of timeline for many obvious reasons which I have had explained already at two previous threads. Being a Timeliner or a Contributionist is related to the age, even I know some older researchers as I am (60+) who like Timeline!!!

Bob, James, thanks for the enlightening comments.

@Bob: If I myself as a researcher do not carry out a proper study of my topic, my manuscript will be (most probably) rejected. If RG strategists (?) don't do their homework, that is no problem (?).

I guess many of us could paint a quite appropriate image of a researcher, as you did in your comment, and RG people do even have the tools for a behaviour analysis (as your example nicely demonstrated), furthermore, presumably, it costs not too much. The research methods are widely known, I guess researchers would be available also at hand. Despite all this the homework is not done. Are we, RG users, to blame?

@James:The grocery example is great. But if the grocery shelves are reorganized, I am just upset, but I myself don't buy other articles. This is similar to the difference of hunting for lemmings and hunting for lions.

ResearchGrocery (thanks for the nice pass!) may redesign its functionality, the more times it happens, the higher the probability that I leave it. (Anyhow, for me it was a threshold case to join; I don't even have a FaceBook account.) So far RG brought new connections and I learned a lot (like from your contributions, gentlemen), but there are limits. And the missing Contribs tab and related functionality brought me close to these limits, so I am close to be alienated...

Thank you again and kind regards, Balázs

Dear all: The new Timeline is incoherent at best. It has a poor and confusing design, most graphic objects make no sense (the green arrows, for example, and there is no graphic difference between questions, comments and publications) which forces the user to squander time trying to discern one type of contribution from another. It seems to be meant to be used as a CV, but does not take into account that we will not be publishing in RG all our publications. My feeling is that, in RG, comments and questions are the most important thing. Lamentably, upvotes of questions and comments are evidently based on popularity as I have realized that most questions are not made by experts on the subject. Confusing quality with popularity I believe is the worst drawback of RG. They should have perfected the "Contributions" page. It would have been simpler.

Best rerards, Lilliana

Introduction of time line may be working for the contributors in the right line as per the convenience of RG & not as  per the contributor .While changing instead of implement straightway ,they have to call for the opinion of contributor .

I am also one of the contributor & instead of asking the question i am trying to reply in my humble mode the answer to the question raised by valued contributor of different countries.

Since the starting of Timeline i have been requesting them to at least let me have total number of answer given by me but i am not receive any responsible from them .

Our valued members have raised question in various range of topics for which in my own humble way i have try to reply answer .I want the total number of answer given by me is also for expanding for topics for our valued contributor .In this line i feel they should restart the numbers which they use to improve in their contribution .

This is my personal opinion 

Dear Rohit,

Yes, you make a good point that the useful short-list that provided such statistics as the user's total numbers of answers (and also the total number of questions) has been removed/deleted. That was a very useful thing that was just taken-away, without any prior discussion with or notice to users. I believe you are absolutely correct in pointing-out that RG is doing exactly what is convenient for RG, without any regard for how the users may feel about it, or how many of us may be negatively impacted by their changes. I would guess they may start "getting the message" that their behavior is infuriating, whenever a great number of us start leaving the site.

Best regards,

Bob

Dear Balázs,

I tend to think that the Timeline was conceived to supply a view of the balance among the different kinds of contributions we do; a way to show our strengths over time in terms of number of articles/questions/answers/contributions made in a given amount of time. I also think that this new look is the best way, they could think of, to bring RG closer to an academic social network.

Having said that, I don’t think this new look is innovative enough to justify the replacement of the classic scheme where our contributions were listed in a far more synthetic way. Exactly because of that: it was synthetic.

Let's not to ignore that you can select what kind of contribution you want to see in your Timeline. So, if you want to see only your articles/publications, you can see them by clicking the right option in the upper right button. If you want to see only the questions you have made, just select the option “questions”, and so forth. You can even select “all” of them. So, within this context I don´t see any mutual exclusion between the Timeline and Contribution schemes (I guess my "short answer" is: it is independent).

However, all the info shown across the Timeline is displayed in a too-much space consuming way, and more unfriendly, than before. If you are looking for an article or question dated long ago, you'll probably have to spend an unnecessarily long while scrolling down across different too many pages with thumbnail previews. Perhaps, adding an “advanced search” button would do a great improvement to this new look, but so far....

Abrazos

Ale

PS: the more ironic thing for me is that I can't find a specific way to ask RG a direct question. We can upload many questions to the system in order to share among us, but I can't find an “Ask Us” or “Contact Us” button. If you have seen one, please let me know because I have a list.

Alejandro,

There is a problem with being able to select and view just your "Publications" in the Timeline. I added a new paper and it shows it about halfway down my publications. That makes absolutely no sense whatsoever.

Re. Radical changes to RG profile pages. People are comforted with the familiar. When you take them outside their comfort zone you stand a chance of alienating them.

 James, 

I unerstand and agree with you and with the other colleagues answering before I did. In general terms, the new RG-format doesn't seem to improve the previous one. Morevover, if people keep finding inconsistencies and problems, it is probable that the RG’s members will soon migrate to other platforms. In other words, RG might lose the contest against the other academic social networks (1). Unfortunately I have to recognize that, although migrating and changing platforms might not be a big deal for the new generations (e-generation?), I ‘m afraid that for me it is a pain in my back :-)

(1) although there must be something newer than this, please, allow me to share with all of you this interesting link that my students and I discussed some while ago.

https://howtopublishinjournals.com/2014/05/18/academic-networks-contest-researchgate-vs-academia-vs-mendeley/

where the author considers that RG "...administrators are very aware of all that is posted in the network, manipulating content, as if we were small children."

Something to think about.

Dear Alejandro,

thanks for your comment that you categorized yourself as "independent". I would tend to accept such a balanced opinion if I could see a master plan of RG in the transition. I have just received two e-mails that my publication list has been updated (by one of my co-authors) together with a link that points to ...publications?editmode=1&sorting=...  i.e. to Publications. What happens is of course a redirection to Timeline where you (not very surprisingly) cannot even see what was updated.

That is what I call non-professional. I learned quite some time ago that if you make major changes in a running system (in my case: GIS database) which is relatively large/used by many users simultaneously, you should have a detailed plan for transition/migration to avoid (1) data loss (2) loss of functionality (3) causing too much extra workload for your users. That is what I do not see, for me this change seems to be rather haphazard. What I do not understand, and I am really curious about how someone (or a group of people) can be so self-assured that he/she/they can simply enforce this change.

Thank you again and kind regards, Balázs

Dear Balázs, dear all,

it seems that ResearchGate has answered our prayers and has now implemented the good old "Contributions" button again, additionally to the timeline feature. I really appreciate this - a good solution for both Contributionists and Timeliners, thank you RG!

Yes, I see Contributions is back.

I think we should congratulate RG staff for listening to our feedback and making the appropriate changes.

Our answer response & our comments 

@all: Thanks for your efforts!

@James: Yes, you are absolutely right! I sent them a request to consider to restore the Contributions tab, and I received a polite, but absolutely useless (and partly irrelevant) answer. But, certainly, they have considered the users' needs (well, it was loud, I guess), so they deserved the congratulations, too.

After all we can consider the issue, depending on your approach:

• a GREAT VICTORY!!! blood, sweat and tears, but victory...
• we (? :-)) worked out a good compromise
• all's well that ends well
• much ado about nothing
• (hey, guys, I was in the field for two weeks, can you update me what happened while I was away? :-) )

Thanks for following and contributing to this discussion, I guess (well, I hope) it can be retired now. So much about science, right? ;-)

Kind regards, Balázs

Great job, Balázs! Best wishes, Roland

Congrats Bal'azs and everybody. I have one last question for you, though: to what address did you send your "request"? Is there an address to send them direct questions/requests/comments?

@Alejandro: At the bottom of the page there is still a "Contact us" link.

https://www.researchgate.net/contact

Among the options one can select "I'd like to give some feedback".

Gracias!!

Fabienne, that's the post of the week, IMHO.You just made my day... THANKS!

Yes, we may call it VICTORY! It is much easier now with Contribution page available again! 

Today I have noticed the change in how I can see the "Contributions" view in my own and other persons' RG profiles. Now the list includes only the articles (no conference papers, books, working papers, datasets), and has an unchangeable heading: "Journal Articles" (in my profile - "Your journal articles" ).

As one can guess, this means that the RG developers after being unable to replace the "Contributions" with "Timeline" at the first try, have now started to implement their "plan B" aimed at making us abandon the "Contributions" view "voluntarily", because they will gradually make it absolutely unusable.

I'm quite disappointed by these changes and by the apparent failure of their initiators to notice or understand numerous comments in this and other discussions of the "Timeline" feature.

I apologize to the RG developers for an ungrounded accusation. The change seems to be quite useful.

I have responded too quickly, later I have noticed that "Articles" in the right-hand column was highlighted, and that one can instead select "Research", etc.

Hi all,

here I can disclose that I am a Timeliner. About a year ago I started with this social medium for research and ever had the opportunity to see acutal data on the timelane and the contributions tab. I regard the data of the timeline tab as very informative. Sorry, but I do not understand the fight over the two world views but regard it as option to either use the timeline or not - but why do you actually rally for the abolishion of the timeline? You are voluntary discarding daily data on the reception of your research...

Today I had 28 reads - more than the reads of each of two previous weeks. Which papers were read? By whom? The timeline could give me an answer today (and a very deatailed one). You made it possible to cut me off from this data - I am not happy and rather ubset about this irrational fight and have RG informed about this accordingly in a feedback...

I ask you to accept both views: timeliners and contributionist views...

Thank you,

Carsten

@Carsten

RG apparently makes such decisions without any consultation with, or concern over, or polling of the opinions of users (even of we most-regular & faithful ones), and without any prior notice or explanation, whatsoever. I am guessing their only consideration is what may be best (least costly ? most profitable ?) to RG's corporate bottom-line interests? So, you are pointing your finger-of-blame at the wrong person(s) ... shouldn't you be pointing-at the cloistered corporatists heading RG?

@Carsten

None of the functions condensed into the "timeline" function is lost; for example, you can still track your interactions via the old methods, available before the "invention" of the new [and not-so-improved IMO] "timeline" ... select the "contributions" tab on your profile page (right beside where the "timeline" tab once appeared), then click on the option links down the right side (e.g., you can track the chronology of your posts by clicking on "answers").

@Carsten

I can guess that your message is a response to recent removal of the Timeline option from the RG user profile page (I have noticed this yesterday, 2017-05-04).

The Timeline page is still accessible (as yet) by way of appending '/timeline' to the person's profile address, like here:

https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Fedor_Dzerzhinskiy/timeline

I too, after criticising the RG's initial attempt to replace the Contributions with the Timeline, got used to the Timeline. The reason is that Timeline allows one to see the numbers of the reads, which are missing from the Contributions page.

@Carsten

First of all I would like to thank you for your opinion, especially because I am (was?) on the other side, and as a researcher I am interested in questions starting with WHY. For that it is good to have another point of view.

A year ago I had mixed feelings, among others basically similar ones what @Bob described above. Since I was pretty much against the timeline in the form it has been created back then (and I have not checked it since then), I could not imagine anything useful functionality of that, whereas we have suggested a number of important and/or useful changes, improvements that were simply acknowledged with polite but empty messages.

I think my point of view was shaped by these events and discussions. My intention was never to contribute to the destruction of anything that someone finds useful, but I vindicate my right not to use/let it switch off that function that I don't like.

And if it was a useful functionality for you and it suddenly disappeared then it happened the same to you but in the opposite sense: without any notice an important change was made.  And IMHO, it is not a good way, even if they have all rights to do so.

Thank you again and kind regards,  Balázs

@all

Perhaps in your anger over the "sneaky" way in which RG suddenly makes changes that affect one of your favorite functions (e.g., the un-announced and un-explained appearance and, then, disappearance of the "timeline" link), you failed to notice other important (and unannounced / unexplained) changes? For example, we apparently can no longer "endorse" others, nor receive endorsements from others. So, the "endorsement" function has also apparently disappeared. 

@all

I am sharing the feedback I received today as feedback from RG:

"Dear Carsten,

Thanks for contacting us. We are actively working on the profile at the moment, and part of that involves removing the Timeline. We'll be providing a focused central tab where you can view all of your reseach and contributions in one place. You can expect these changes soon. In the meantime, we apologize for any inconvenience caused.

Kind regards,

Thomas

RG Community Support"

Let us hope that publication page will be brought back again, as before! We can not search publications by query of few words, just by one topic!!!

I appreciate the fact of the above response from RG. But their response conveys little information, which cannot be inferred from the very fact of Timeline removal. Especially in view of previous experience of RG's attempt to replace Contributions by Timeline. And I'm not sure that 'providing a focused central tab' is meant to bring back the Publications page again.

This evening (2017-06-01) the Timeline is no longer accessible by way of appending '/timeline' to the person's Profile URL.

Hi all,

by chance I found a new feature yesterday which is a little disturbing:

When I am not logged in I can see all reads and citations for all my contributions in the contribution tab. Nice to know but why on earth should this be visible for the internet public but not for the author/contributor?! It should be the other way round!!!

Best wishes,

Carsten

P.S.: I have posted this question for the feedback team and will deliver the answer in case they are answering to us...

Carsten, thanks for this information. I have just visited my Contributions without logging in, and yes, there were Reads and Citations for each item.

Let's see what the answer of feedback team will be. I think RG has became very open portal, as they have been commercialized (jobs for example). Instead of jobs, I would like to see publications tab. How about you?

Hi all, 

the answer I received from RG was very vague but yes we (RG) are working on many issues currently....

New roll outs comprise the tab recommendations, last question answered to, etc. All highly scientific measures...

Alas we have to wait and see and well either use the new items or ignore them...

Best, Carsten

The wave of major changes in the RG user interface, following the removal of the Timeline, instead of nearing the completion seems to be immediately followed by still more changes.

Several days ago the number of Reads displayed at the page of my only RG Question has dropped from 104 to 7. The Reads of the other person's Questions have dropped down greatly too.

One can guess RG have changed their method of counting the Reads on questions. Prior to this, for some weeks the new method was used inconsistently, only in the Stats, while the old method was still used for individual Questions. Now RG developers have corrected this discrepancy.

In some cases the new method produces funny results. For example, the question 'What's this "RG score" nonsence?' at this moment (2017-08-19) has less Reads (274) than Followers (304):

https://www.researchgate.net/posr/Whats_this_RG_Score_nonsence

In the process of writing the above, I have suddenly discovered that RG have removed from my Stats the Profile View count.

In anticipation of further major changes, I'd like to mention here a pair of losses and one gain that the recent wave of changes has brought, and which seem to be relatively significant.

Loss 1.The removal of the Timeline has hidden from the users the data, that were accessible through the Timeline in the form of an items-list, about the attributes (such as Reads, Citations, Up-Votes, etc.) of many sorts of items (publications, questions, answers, and even comments).

Gain 1. A strange feature compensating partially for the above loss. When one visits the Publications list in any RG user's profile, WITHOUT BEING REGISTERED in RG, one sees the attributes of each item in the list (Reads, Citations, etc.). Why the RG hides these attributes from the registered users, is a mystery. And it's hard to forsee how long this strange feature will exist.

Loss 2. There is no way for the user now to distinguish, regarding person's Publications, between "Summary reads", "On-page reads", and "Downloads". All of these are now counted as simply the "Reads".

I have pointed out this loss, because in many cases a Summary-read, if not followed by Download or On-page-read, may mean, unlike the later two, that the publication was not interesting enough to the reader. The summation of the numbers of Summary-reads and Downloads is a rather meaningless operation.

Of course this does not preclude us from enjoying a faster growth of the Reads, Recommendations, etc. of our various contributions

We only should not be too serious, and should not think too much about the meanings in cases where no one guarantees their presence.