Dear @Mizanur, 

The importance of citation is large, see attached paper "The Importance of Citation "!

Regarding ResearchGate algorithm for number of citations, I am not aware of, but You should ask RG Officials for appropriate answer!

http://web.grinnell.edu/Dean/Tutorial/EUS/IC.pdf

Dear @Mizanur, 

The importance of citation is large, see attached paper "The Importance of Citation "!

Regarding ResearchGate algorithm for number of citations, I am not aware of, but You should ask RG Officials for appropriate answer!

http://web.grinnell.edu/Dean/Tutorial/EUS/IC.pdf

Citations is the number of times a paper is cited or quoted as a reference to an authority or a precedent. How RG calculates is not known. Here are a few links for useful information for other citations.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citation

https://code.google.com/p/citations-gadget/

http://digicmb.blogspot.com/2013/06/ways-to-calculate-your-h-index-free-and.html

Citations is a kind of measure of how many publications did cite the paper and it is first adopted by Thomson SCI. It is at all not clear  how it is calculated by Research Gate.

Dear Ljubomir Jacić sir

I have already visited the attached (cited) article but i expect to see my name as reference but i did not find it. So, what is !!!!!

I believe it is the same method of calculation, Scopus has citation system which is more or less similar to Thomson. I read in RG discussion somewhere that they are going to modify the system of citations.

You may use the command 'add citation' that will appear sooner or later, though system is not yet perfect, it keep in pending,

Briefly, citation analysis involves counting the number of times an article is cited by other works to measure the impact of a publication or author. The caviat however, there is no single citation analysis tools that collects all publications and their cited references. For a thorough analysis of the impact of an author or a publication, one needs to look in multiple databases to find all possible cited references.  Three main resources to identify your cited works:

1-Web of Science by ISI (indexes over 10,000 journals)

2- Scopus by Elsevier (indexes over 15,000 journals )

3- Google Scholar by Google (gives more cited references than WOS and Scopus!)

A summary of definitions and importance of h-index, Eigenfactor, Impact Factor (IF), Journal Citation Reports, Citation Analysis, and other tools is available in the following link "Measuring Your Impact: Impact Factor, Citation Analysis, and other Metrics ".

http://researchguides.uic.edu/content.php?pid=163124&sid=1386676

Number of citations and not the number of publications is the real representation of our scientific work.

Good thing in this decade is that everything is online and appears on web sites no matter where you publish. So if paper is important and is published in even low profile journal, it still gets cited.

There is minor glitch, if 2 papers of same idea appear, one is high profile journal and one in low profile journal, the one with high profile journal get cited, dumping the low profile journal.

Also people try to cite big-named scientist's papers over junior scientis's paper of the same theme.

Need less to say, citation is a very important indicator of academic influence and relevance of a publication.

As Google search for most sources of information, it would yields the highest number of citations a paper has attracted.

As for RG, the number of citations found by RG is a fracftion of those found by Google. I guess RG perhaps only look up publications that appeard since its creation, but not deeply back into a longer histrory.

Thanks everybody for valuable responses.

Whatever it is I think the algorithm used by RG to come up with the numbers is ridiculous. It needs serious revision..

My dear friends, the attached paper is critically explaining the RG score! "The paper shows that the RG score, used by the Researchgate open scientific gateway, is seriously flawed. The hard-core center of the RG Score, besides interactions, is the journal impact factor system, used in the RG Score and the overall ranking of journal publications. Upon closer inspection, it is evident that RG impact factors are based on the geographically and culturally very biased Thomson Reuters Web of Knowledge (WoK) database, but that the RG team even commits errors and omissions in feeding the original WoK impact factor data into the RG system."

http://www.academia.edu/2460163/Researchgate_RG-Scores_or_a_true_Research_Gate_to_Global_Research_On_the_limits_of_the_RG_factor_and_some_scientometric_evidence_on_how_the_current_RG_score_system_discriminates_against_economic_and_social_sciences_and_against_the_developing_countries

I am Strongly agree with the answers of Prof. Nageswara Rao Posinasetti & Prof.Ljubomir Jacić.

At the same time You may ask RG Contact site for appropriate answer! please.

https://www.researchgate.net/contact

Dear @Gopinath, the best way for getting an answer, is to use feedback option!

https://feedback.researchgate.net/

The impotance of citations is crucial! I do not know how RG calculates that. What I know is that RG does not take into account Google citations. 

Let us hope dear @Costas that they will establish relation with Google Scholar! That would be imperative! 

Further more, I have got mail from Elsevier SCOPUS about new 2013 metrics! This is very interesting for this thread!

Dear Ljubomir, good link!

Citations tells the practical utility and importance/value of any paper as well as its adaptation by the scientific community. . Regarding RG ---- I think it is based on RG members registered or filled in by you or else bset answer would be given by RG support team.

If I know RG calculates the score, my score definitely increased. 

Are u sure Ruchi?

Now is Ok Ruchi,

Now is Ok Ruchi,

I found my paper being downloaded for more than thousand times but without even single citation in RG. I don't know how RG is calculating the citations. More over there is no citations tab for each paper, similar to download button. I think the idea of having citation button for each paper of a author would be nice to record the number of citations.

RG is not keeping record of citations new research scholars work.

RG should consider all researchers work and record their citations.

Dear @Lakshmi, there is no relation between number of downloads and number of citations. Try the following link.

I am not pleased with the citation system at Research Gate. The most of citations I have entered manually. They should use Google Scholar!

https://explore.researchgate.net/display/news/2013/02/07/Introducing+Citations+on+ResearchGate

Dear colleague,

As you may know, the number of citations a given publication receives somehow accounts for its importance and popularity among the scholars. Therefore, a highly cited researcher could be commended for impressing the researchers and contributing to his/her field. That's why Researchgate considers citations as one of the factors that affect RG score.

Regarding the accuracy of citation numbers, it should be noted that RG has not claimed it to be exhaustive. Thus, unintentional inequity may occur!

Wish you luck

Saeid Zandi