So far, several researchers databases currently exist. All of them have their pros and their cons.
I am not quite sure which is the best. I see advantages of reserchgate compared to to others but at the same time I can identify limitations which I can not see in others (academia.edu, Linkedin etc).
As a am a biomedical researcher, I can only discuss the pros and cons which are relevant to my field but this may not apply to other scientific fields.
I open this discussion in search of comments which will advance the open discussion for an improvement of the existing databases.
Comments are well come
regards
D
I asked a similar question recently and I believe that some answers can be relevant to this issue ...
https://www.researchgate.net/post/Research_Gate_or_Academiaedu
There is no doubt that Google scholar and ORCID are very informative. Google scholar is giving you information about researcher's papers and citations and it is not interactive i.e cannot be considered researcher's social media. You cannot see info related to the CV of the researcher. ORCID has the option for the researcher to give some infonaut is not interactive as RG. RG's score by the way does not always represent the research output (papers, citations, scientific excellence of the researcher and this is an issue).
As you wrote at the beginning all these have their pros and cons. Google Scholar citations are debatable - some of them aren't really scientific. RG sets an arbitrary (and quite annoying) score, which depends on non-scientific aspects to a very large extend. Academia.eu used to be top of the game, but not anymore. It is a reliable source but not as much as it used to be. Same with Publons (ResearcherID) - which in my previous academic post, we were encouraged to join by our Faculty Leadership Team. Orcid offers a wider variety of information available, but this is more researcher-dependent. I'm forced to use it because of my funding, but I don't personally have all of my details open. I personally don't look for collaborators from any of these. I prefer to go directly to the authors, after reading a good paper and exchange ideas. I do understand however, their need, for dissemination - in our time and age, they can be good platforms to spread the word.
Researchgate.net, Academia.edu, Labsexplorer.com, selectminds.com, linkedin.com, twitter.com, mendeley.com, are only some of the numerous platforms that are available to serve as social networks also/for scientists.
At any case, it depends on the purpose since every platform has pros and cons and presents a variety of characteristics. My personal preference is Research Gate.
Dear Prof Bogdanos
Thanks for opening this interesting discussion.
In addition to those mentioned above, I want to mention Publons (ResearcherID). It is the data base of the Web of Science.
https://www.researcherid.com/#rid-for-researchers
Recently Publons began recording our participation as peer reviewers. The problem I see in this database is that it takes a long time to acquire the new citations and it also fails to acquire all of them, so the H index is generally lower than those that appear in other databases. However, it is used by many financing agencies to evaluate the academic activity of doctoral and postdoctoral scholarship candidates.
Best regards,
Dear Markos
In my opinion, the problem with Google Academic is that the researcher should review his/her profile and eliminate those publications that are from another person or those that are duplicated. If we all did that, it would really be the best of all. But unfortunately not everyone does that job, so sometimes the information it offers is not always real. When I want to look for the academic activity of a certain researcher, I usually use Google Schoolar, Pubmed and Researchgate.
Dear Colleagues and Friends from RG, In the field of various scientific disciplines, scientific knowledge databases containing large collections of digitized publications with the ability to search for publications, i.e. containing more or less advanced search tools, include the following science portals: Research Gate, Academia.edu, Google Scholar. However, there are also Internet knowledge databases specialized in specific scientific disciplines with open access to scientific knowledge resources. In the field of medical disciplines, the knowledge base PubMed is an example. In addition, specific publications can also be found on popular, non-specialized in the world of social media social networking sites, such as LinkedIn, Tweeter, Google+ etc. However, on these sites the resources of scientific publications are much smaller than on scientific portals.
Best wishes
The best research database for the researcher is RG, SCOPUS and Science Direct
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