I think researchgate and other engines should remove self-citations. If an author is one of the authors (not necessarily first author) of the citing work, then this citation should not be counted. It is natural and ethical requirement that if one is continuing on one's old work to cite previous related work. However, this by no means reflects how the research community in general is benefiting from this work and thus should not be counted. Please note that while some authors are forced to self-cite their work ethically to show relation to past work (and allow reviewers to judge degree of novelty of new work), many authors around the world appear to deliberately self-cite their work to increase their citations. Some trickier less obvious semi self-citation criterion was reported by a colleague. My colleague commented that it was clear that some high impact factor journal agrees to consider relatively weak publications, if they include several citations to other articles in the same journal (which means if published it can help in increasing the journal's impact factor). I hope that these issues are adopted seriously by research evaluation engines (hope there is some way to convey this point of view to them) to assure fair research evaluation..
There are other indices that make provisions to distinguish self-citation from all citations. h index is useful in such a situation, and it is also calculated by RG.
Hi Gehan Abouelseoud,
I think RG is more like a social platform where researchers can access to and comment other peoples' work. If you really want to evaluate a scientist, you can use other platforms like scopus, which provides a comprehensive tool to judge the quality of a researcher's work (e.g. h-index and citations with or without self-citations). However, you also have to be aware that citations and H-index do not really reflect the real value of a scientist's work (read the attached publication for more information).
https://www.scopus.com
Hello there,
Research gate is just like a social-network for researchers from different fields to share and gain and have some fun and make some contacts to collaborate. So the algorithm based for this platform is not going to be a very hardcore one and thus can be faulty, bypassed and with a lot of glitches.
My advice is do not take research gate seriously.
Regards
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