I am not sure about Research Gate. But what I used some years ago, and I suppose pls have a look if it is still up to date, it was called GraphViz. I used it in the surroundings of a semantic wiki implementation and it was quite useful. But it always depends on which technology you want to apply it....
I have used Gephi (http://gephi.github.io) with good results to do social networks analyses in my institution. As it is an open platform you can develop a plug-in to connect Gephi with Research Gate through RG's API. After that you can collect the data you need from RG and put it in your Gephi space. However, RG's API is not public at all. They only declare some plug-ins at https://www.researchgate.net/developers.Plugins.html.