I am trying to figure out why ResearchGate.net shows substantially fewer citations for a journal article than Google Scholar does. For example, for my publication, "Impact of the 2008-2010 Economic Recession on Local Health Departments", the Research Gate shows 66 citations and Google Scholar shows 94 (see https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=XFEt8ckAAAAJ&hl=en).
I am curious if others have similar experience and if Research Gate should standardize its protocol for crediting citations with sister sites such as Google scholar.
Agree with Dr. Christopher NOCK
Yea, as I understand it, researchgate only lists citations in other articles that are listed by other authors who are also members of this website. Google fishes with a wider net.
Yea, as I understand it, researchgate only lists citations in other articles that are listed by other authors who are also members of this website. Google fishes with a wider net.
Christopher NOCK
Thank you, Dr. Nock for sharing your understanding of the difference. So if self citations are excluded that is justifiable but excluding non-member citations is misleading; my two cents.
I agree with you both, Drs. Das and Nock. Thanks for your perspectives.
From the explanation provided by the research gate about citations, what I gather is that the RG's program does not have the ability to extract information from certain formats. It says they are trying to improve their software.
Vijay, how did they come to provide that information? It's rather different than the story I heard some time ago.
NOCK
I've had the opposite experience. The essay of a magazine of level in which my book was cited told me RG immediately, while google-scholar so far did not respond.
Hein
When you place the mouse pointer on the word "Citations" in the RG platform, the following statement will appear: "This number is based on the publications in our database and might not be exhaustive". This may explain why the same number of citations in the Google Scholar did not appear on the RG platform.
Regards.
Mohammed, thanks so much for that. I think that's the information I started with some time ago.
NOCK
Researchgate only lists citations in other articles in researchgate. Google searches a wider domain. For example Google considers the citations in PHD thesis or other documents. On the other hand, Researchgate is faster than Google. Researchgate counts citations of your paper 1 day after releasing the paper. However, Google updates your citations 10 days after releasing the paper.
This is due to the fact that ResearchGate only counts citations found in papers that have full text in in ResearchGate database. While citations using standard citation styles are usually extracted accurately on ResearchGate, there are some instances where they cannot be extracted – for example, for full-text PDFs that have been created from scanned hard copies.
Agree with Dr. Christopher NOCK
Yea, as I understand it, researchgate only lists citations in other articles that are listed by other authors who are also members of this website. Google fishes with a wider net.
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