Constant communication in scientific networks as well as continuous process of articles writing according to the motto “Publish or Perish” distracts a scientist from thinking process and from doing high quality research. In the context of publication activity the abovementioned was one of the reasons to launch new paradigm in formal scientific communication which is called “Liquid publications” (see my question “Is the existing paradigm of scientific communication exhausting itself?”).
Therefore we should ask the following question: what can motivate a scientist to work in such networks? Is it the opportunity to improve “visibility” of research results? Not likely. This problem is successfully solved by Institutional OA – repositories alongside with Google Scholar. Is it the opportunity to show author’s publications’ impact? But traditional author’s citation indices which are available at Web of Science, Scopus and Google Scholar also solve this problem.
In this regard to involve as many users as possible into their network developers of Research Gate had to provide the users with a great amount of attractive services which weekly or daily show how frequently author’s profiles and publications are browsed, articles are downloaded, questions are put and answered etc. Moreover a number of services provide opportunity to see request distribution according to countries and institutions.
The usefulness of Research Gate can provide ideas for conducting new researches and can help in cooperative authorship.
These services are very useful indeed but there is discontent about non-transparency of RG Score calculation. It is for you to guess which specific indicators are included into its calculation (number of downloaded articles, total impact, number of publications, questions, answers and citations etc.) And what about their weight coefficients? Are they considered and how are they defined? Answers to these questions would considerably decrease the value of the network in question.
It is not difficult to understand that the total impact is the sum of impact-factors of Web of Science - journals taken for the current year where the articles of the author posted on the Research Gate have been published. We believe that the value of the platform would increase, if the total impact was calculated according SCOPUS - journals, the quantity of which is twice as big as the quantity of Web of Science - journals. For comparability of impact factors of Web of Science to SCOPUS – journals it is necessary to take impact factors of the database SCOPUS according to SCIMAGO - platform in the column Docs / 2 years, but not in the database SCOPUS, which contains indicators SJR and SNIP not comparable to the classical impact factors, published in the JCR.
Therefore, I offer to developers of Research Gate to calculate also the SCOPUS Total Impact along with the Web of Science Total Impact.
Research Gate allows to generate total number of citations in author’s profile. However for each specific article there are options “citation” (references) and “cited in” out of which only the second is included into the total number of citations. Closer inspection of what forms the total number of citations in the author’s profile shows that it includes the sum of “cited in” indicators in all the author’s articles. So there is a discrepancy here.
I suppose that the solution of problems regarding the calculation of RG Score and Total Impact could improve the performance of Research Gate and its attractiveness.
One of the disadvantages of RG are badly formulated questions, as this one appears to be. You ask about advantages and disadvantages of RG and then lead the discussion into a long-winded speculations about impact factors and total impact score, as this would be a any major advantage/disadvantage of RG.
You should simply have asked "Does anyone want to read my thoughts on total impact score?". That would have been a correctly formulated question! ;-)
Fortunately or not, the handling of publications, their number as well as their associated IFs and citation frequency by RG is so BAD, that these "bibliometric indices" given in RG are all completely meaningless. There are major problems on RG with duplicate duplications, missing publications, publications without IFs associated to them, not to talk about the "citation frequency" which is a real joke (currently, RG lists 3% of the ISI indicated number of citations to my papers).
So my suggestion is simply to stop thinking about RG as a reliable source of bibliometric information - it's not! Such information can be easily obtained elsewhere for those interested, so for me this is not an issue. The RG score is, of course, another joke!
To actually answer the question posed in this thread, there are two main advantages I see with RG:
1) Open and free scientific discussion forum, important for young and established scientists alike.
2) Sharing of full-text pdf files of papers not published in OA journals. The only "stats" I enjoy looking at on RG is the number of down-loads of my papers, currently at >3100
Dear Vladimir,
thanks for your great "article", in fact.
I fully support your idea to add a Scopus-oriented type of metric to the merely ISI-oriented traditional impact factor (IF) in order to improve usability and equilibrium in the appearance of ResearchGate (RG).
An additional 'pro' of RG came to my mind: through ResearchGate it becomes possible to quickly strive through a variety of personal success strategies of different authors: some are specialized with high probability to publish in fields prone to high IF (biosciences etc.), others decide for a broader personal profile which renders it certainly less easy to achieve hard-core IF.
To me, innovation lies also in conceiving new and unconventional ideas, concepts and paradigms. Apart from taking longer, such endeavours tends to be underrated by the peer-review based system of IF generation: "high quality = what resembles most easily the existing paradigms and research" - to some extent the structural opposite of structures encouraged by IF.
Still, RG by its offer of "original" pdf encourages to read and understand the innovative content of publications ;-)
Hence: RG = a chance for new perceptions - which is quite much.
Best, Gilbert
PS: I just tried to ponder on simila issues in two handbook articles: "Education and literature for development in responsibility" and "Quality assurance in transnational education management".
One of the disadvantages of RG are badly formulated questions, as this one appears to be. You ask about advantages and disadvantages of RG and then lead the discussion into a long-winded speculations about impact factors and total impact score, as this would be a any major advantage/disadvantage of RG.
You should simply have asked "Does anyone want to read my thoughts on total impact score?". That would have been a correctly formulated question! ;-)
Fortunately or not, the handling of publications, their number as well as their associated IFs and citation frequency by RG is so BAD, that these "bibliometric indices" given in RG are all completely meaningless. There are major problems on RG with duplicate duplications, missing publications, publications without IFs associated to them, not to talk about the "citation frequency" which is a real joke (currently, RG lists 3% of the ISI indicated number of citations to my papers).
So my suggestion is simply to stop thinking about RG as a reliable source of bibliometric information - it's not! Such information can be easily obtained elsewhere for those interested, so for me this is not an issue. The RG score is, of course, another joke!
To actually answer the question posed in this thread, there are two main advantages I see with RG:
1) Open and free scientific discussion forum, important for young and established scientists alike.
2) Sharing of full-text pdf files of papers not published in OA journals. The only "stats" I enjoy looking at on RG is the number of down-loads of my papers, currently at >3100
Dear Gilbert Ahamer,
Thank you for your original view of Research Gate usefulness and your contributions to the discussion.
In addition to it, as I mentioned before, option “citation” in section ‘Contributions” of the author’s profile does not correspond to the same option if the author’s article is under consideration. In this case option “citation” does correspond to “reference” (article’s bibliography). As a result, the quantity of citation of these articles is rather low in spite the fact that there are lots of full text articles laid out by the authors. As far as I see, there are at least two reasons explaining this.
1. Options “citation” and “cited in” for any concrete article are active only for RG community members. Let us accept that with a help of Web of Science, Scopus or Google Scholar you have defined all the articles ‘citing in’ yours, then you test each of these articles with option “cited in”, which in its turn offers you to choose the necessary one among the relevant articles of RG community members. But the problem is that there is none, because the author referring to your article might be not a member of RG community, and even in case he is, he is not likely to lay out the article in RG. So, with a help of “cited in” option the total number of citations of all your articles is calculated on the basis of the quantity of citation and is represented in the section ‘Contributions” of your profile.
2. When you include the reference to your articles with an option “cited in”, they are neither to appear in the section ‘Contributions” immideately, nor to appear at all. They are to get an endorsement of the authors ‘citing in’ your article. This citation will be marked as pending until it’s confirmed by an author. And this is the weakest point of RG algorithm. We cannot be sure the authors are promptly informed about it and even if they are, it turned out to be so many incomplete profiles in RG without any feedback. Some profiles seemed not to be completed by the authors themselves. E.g. Each of six publications of a well-known geomorphologist J.D.Phillips referring to our article A.M. Trofimov and V.M. Moskovkin “The dynamic models of geomorphological systems” (1984) is located in different profiles, moreover, none of them is active.
To my mind, there should be the following RG algorithm. When the reference to your article with an option “cited in” is confirmed by the author there will be an automatically produced announcement about your article in the profile of the author referring to it but with a help of option “citation”, in this case corresponding to reference. While simultaneously all references are to be calculated. If the full text articles are posted in RG and if there is an opportunity of full text publications searching through Google Scholar or through option “reference” in publishing platforms, there won’t be any difficulty to work out a simple algorithm for automatic confirmation of references based on machine learning.
Google Scholar successfully solves this problem, making links on each article (option “cited by”) and summing them up in the author’s profile (option “citation”).
P.S. I had given this respond before the second contributor to our discussion joined us. The presented above text more or less explains the cons of RG algorithm’s working activity, and it does correspond to the questions put by professor Björn Thrandur Björnsson. I am grateful for his condescending attitude towards RG, which I share as well.
Major use:
We can share our researches
Major Disadvantage:
RG score has no value in formal academics
WE CAN DISCUSS MATTERS RELATED TO RESEARCHERS IN DEVELOPED AND DEVELOPING COUNTRIES
A little change is no harm. I wouldn't expect too much, but I wouldn't underestimate it. Either way: RG requires a relatively long time from every user if you want to take a certain place in the system, in discussions and also when publishing your own texts. Once you are in there and have fun communicating worldwide, for example, you easily become dependent, in my experience. Then it is quite good if you can get along without RG for a while.
Do ResearchGate Scores create ghost academic reputations? Enrique Orduna-Malea1 , Alberto Martín-Martín2 , Mike Thelwall3 and Emilio Delgado LópezCózar2* The academic social network site ResearchGate (RG) has its own indicator, RG Score, for its members. The high profile nature of the site means that the RG score may be used for recruitment, promotion and other tasks for which researchers are evaluated. In response, this study investigates whether it is reasonable to employ the RG Score as evidence of scholarly reputation. For this, three different author samples were investigated. An outlier sample includes 104 authors with high values. A Nobel sample comprises 73 Nobel winners from Medicine & Physiology, Chemistry, Physics and Economics (from 1975 to 2015). A longitudinal sample includes weekly data on 4 authors with different RG Scores. The results suggest that high RG Scores are built primarily from activity related to asking and answering questions in the site. In particular, it seems impossible to get a high RG Score solely through publications. Within RG it is possible to distinguish between (passive) academics that interact little in the site and active platform users, who can get high RG Scores through engaging with others inside the site (questions, answers, social networks with influential researchers). Thus, RG Scores should not be mistaken for academic reputation indicators.
I believe that the RG platform is not an accurate indicator of the academic standing and reputation of the researchers and colleagues involved in this platform, but this platform has been able to achieve scientific and social communication among colleagues in different parts of the world more than other platforms.
Advantages;
Learning and sharing of knowledge in especially research and teaching
Research collaborations
Wide visibility of a scholar's profile, publications, citations and projects
Disadvantages:
Not well structured questions and answers, making it sometimes impossible to understand and respond
Wrong invitation on very technical questions to scholars with different fields of inquiry
A lot of researchers think about this question but never ask.
however, I am personally i have a good experience with it which is now I can find researchs in any field by easy and modern way. Moreover,one of of my first publication was it because the researchgate.
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