ResearchGate

ResearchGate
Web address http://researchgate.net/
Type of site
 Social network service for scientists
Users 9 million[1]
Owner ResearchGate, Berlin, Germany
Created by Ijad Madisch, Sören Hofmayer, Horst Fickenscher
Launched May 2008
Alexa rank
 Increase 664 (December 2015)[2]

ResearchGate is a social networking site for scientists and researchers[3] to share papers, ask and answer questions, and find collaborators.[4] According to a study by Nature and an article in Times Higher Education, it is the largest academic social network in terms of active users.[5][1]

Users that wish to register to use the site need to have an email address at a recognized institution or to be manually confirmed as a published researcher in order to sign up for an account.[6] Users of the site each have a user profile and can upload research output including papers, data, chapters, negative results, patents, research proposals, methods, presentations, and software source code. Users may also follow the activities of other users and engage in discussions with them. Users are also able to block interactions with other users.

The site has been criticized for sending unsolicited email invitations to coauthors of the articles listed on the site that are written to appear as if the email messages were sent by the other coauthors of the articles and for automatically generating apparent profiles for non-users who have sometimes felt misrepresented by them.[5]

Features

The New York Times described the site as a mashup of Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.[4] One may "follow" a research interest, in addition to following individual users.[7] It has a blogging feature for users to write short reviews on peer-reviewed articles.[7] ResearchGate indexes self-published information on user profiles to suggest members to connect with those who have similar interests.[4] When a user posts a question, it is fielded to others that have identified on their user profile that they have a relevant expertise.[8] It also has private chat rooms where scientists can share data, edit shared documents, or discuss confidential topics.[9] The site also features a research-focused job board.[10]

As of 2016, it claims to have more than 9 million users,[1][10] with its largest user-bases coming from Europe and North America.[11] Most of ResearchGate's users are involved in medicine or biology,[9][7] though it also has participants from engineering, computer science, agricultural sciences, and psychology, among others.[7]

ResearchGate publishes a citation impact measurement in the form of an "RG Score". RG Scores have been reported to be correlated with existing citation impact measures but have also been criticized as having questionable reliability and an unknown calculation methodology.[12][13][14][15] ResearchGate does not require peer review or fees.[16] Since accessing documents usually requires an account, ResearchGate is not considered to be open access.[17]

History

ResearchGate was founded in 2008[8] by virologist and computer scientist Dr. Ijad Madisch, who remains the company's CEO,[4][1] with another physician Dr. Sören Hofmayer, and a computer scientist Horst Fickenscher.[10] It started in Boston, Massachusetts, and moved to Berlin, Germany, shortly afterwards.[11]

The company's first round of funding, in 2010, was led by the venture capital firm Benchmark, with contributions from investors such as Joachim Schoss, founder of the German portal site 24Scout.[18] Benchmark partner Matt Cohler became a member of the board and participated in the decision to move to Berlin.[19]

According to The New York Times, the website began with few features, then developed over time based on input from scientists.[4] From 2009 to 2011, the site grew from 25,000 users to more than 1 million.[9]

A second round of funding led by Peter Thiel's Founders Fund was announced in February 2012.[19] On June 4, 2013, it closed Series C financing arrangements for $35M from investors including Bill Gates.[20][21]

The company grew from 12 employees in 2011 to 120 in 2014.[4][11]

ResearchGate's competitors include Academia.edu and Mendeley.[1] Academia.edu reportedly has more registered users (about 34 million versus 9 million) and higher web traffic, but ResearchGate is substantially larger in terms of active usage by researchers.[1][5] The fact that ResearchGate restricts its user accounts to people at recognized institutions and published researchers may explain the disparity in active usage, as a high percentage of the accounts on Academia.edu are lapsed or inactive.[1][5]

Madisch has said the company's business strategy is focused on highly-targeted advertising based on analysis of the activities of users, saying "Imagine you could click on a microscope mentioned in a paper and buy it", and estimating the spending on science at $1 trillion per year under the control of a "relatively small number of people".[1]

Reception

A 2009 article in BusinessWeek reported that ResearchGate was a "potentially powerful link" in promoting innovation in developing countries by connecting scientists from those nations with their peers in industrialized nations.[22] It said the website had become popular largely due to its ease of use. It also said that ResearchGate had been involved in several notable cross-country collaborations between scientists that led to substantive developments.[22]

A 2012 paper published in the The International Information & Library Review conducted a survey with 160 respondents and reported that out of those respondents using social networking "for academic purposes", Facebook and ResearchGate were the most popular at the University of Delhi, but also "a majority of respondents said using SNSs [Social Networking Sites] may be a waste of time".[23] Another paper reported that only a small fraction of users (about 85000) were active in the Q&A part of the site.[24]

Although ResearchGate is used internationally, its uptake—as of 2014—is uneven, with Brazil having particularly many users and China having few when compared to the number of publishing researchers.[12]

In a 2014 study by Nature, 88 percent of the responding scientists and engineers said that they were aware of ResearchGate[5]:Q1 and would use it when "contacted", but less than 10% said they would use it to actively discuss research with 40% instead preferring to use Twitter when discussing research.[5] ResearchGate was visited regularly by half of those surveyed by Nature, coming second to Google Scholar. 29 percent of regular visitors had signed up for a profile on ResearchGate in the past year,[5] and 35% of the survey participants were invited by e-mail.[5]

A 2016 article in Times Higher Education reported that in a global survey of 20,670 people who use academic social networking sites, ResearchGate was the dominant network and was twice as popular as others: 61 percent of respondents who had published at least one paper had a ResearchGate profile.[1] Another study reported that "relatively few academics appear to post questions and answers", but instead use it only as an "online CV".[15]

Criticisms

ResearchGate has been criticized for emailing unsolicited invitations to the coauthors of its users.[25][5]:Q2 These emails are written as if they were personally sent by the user, but they are sent automatically unless the user opts out,[26][5]:Q3 which causes some researchers to boycott the service because of this marketing tactic[5]:Q4 and contributes to the negative view of ResearchGate in the scientific community.[5]:Q5,Q7

A study published by the Association for Information Systems found that a dormant account on ResearchGate, using default settings, generated 297 invitations to 38 people over a 16-month period, and that the user profile was automatically attributed to more than 430 publications.[26] Furthermore, journalists and researchers have found that the "RG score", calculated by ResearchGate via a proprietary algorithm,[26] can reach high values under questionable circumstances.[26][27]

Several studies have looked at the RG score, for which details are not published. These studies concluded that the RG score was "intransparent and irreproducible",[14] criticized the way it incorporates the journal impact factor into the user score, and suggested that it should "not be considered in the evaluation of academics".[14] The results were confirmed in a second "response" study, which also found the score to depend mostly on journal impact factors.[15] The RG score was found to be negatively correlated with network centrality,[28] i.e., that users that are the most active (and thus central to the network) on ResearchGate usually do not have high RG scores. It was also found to be strongly positively correlated with Quacquarelli Symonds university rankings at the institutional level, but only weakly with Elsevier SciVal rankings of individual authors.[13] While it was found to be correlated with different university rankings, the correlation inbetween these rankings themselves was higher.[12]

Nature also reported that "Some of the apparent profiles on the site are not owned by real people, but are created automatically – and incompletely – by scraping details of people's affiliations, publication records and PDFs, if available, from around the web. That annoys researchers who do not want to be on the site, and who feel that the pages misrepresent them – especially when they discover that ResearchGate will not take down the pages when asked."[5]:Q6,Q7 ResearchGate uses a crawler to find PDF versions of articles on the homepages of authors and publishers.[5]:Q6 These are then presented as if they had been uploaded to the web site by the author:[5]:Q7, Q8 the PDF will be displayed embedded in a frame, and only the button label "External Download" indicates that the file was in fact not uploaded to ResearchGate.

References

  1. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 Matthews, David. "Do academic social networks share academics' interests?". Times Higher Education. Retrieved 22 April 2016.
  2. ↑ "researchgate.net Site Overview". Alexa Internet. Retrieved 2015-12-21.
  3. ↑ http://osc.universityofcalifornia.edu/2015/12/a-social-networking-site-is-not-an-open-access-repository/
  4. 1 2 3 4 5 6 Lin, Thomas (16 January 2012). "Cracking open the scientific process". The New York Times. Retrieved 26 June 2014.
  5. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 "Online collaboration: Scientists and the social network". Nature. 2014-08-13. Retrieved 2014-11-06.
    Quote 1: ResearchGate is certainly well-known [...] More than 88% of scientists and engineers said that they were aware of it.
    Quote 2: "They do send you a lot of spam," [Billie Swalla] says
    Quote 3: [...] regularly sending out automated e-mails that profess to come from colleagues active on the site
    Quote 4: "I think it is a disgraceful kind of marketing and I am choosing not to use their service because of that", [Lars Arvestad] says
    Quote 5: "I've met basically no academics in my field with a favourable view of ResearchGate", says Daniel MacArthur
    Quote 6: Some of the apparent profiles on the site are not owned by real people, but are created automatically – and incompletely – by scraping details of people's affiliations, publication records and PDFs
    Quote 7: That annoys researchers who do not want to be on the site, and who feel that the pages misrepresent them – especially when they discover that ResearchGate will not take down the pages when asked.
    Quote 8: [Madisch] will not say how many of [the papers available on ResearchGate] have been automatically scraped from freely accessible places elsewhere.
  6. ↑ "Signing up for ResearchGate: My email address isn't recognized. Can I still sign up?". ResearchGate official web site. Retrieved 2016-04-23.
  7. 1 2 3 4 Diane Rasmussen Neal (6 August 2012). Social Media for Academics: A Practical Guide. Elsevier Science. p. 28. ISBN 978-1-78063-319-0.
  8. 1 2 Hardy, Quentin (August 3, 2012). "Failure Is the Next Opportunity". Retrieved June 26, 2014.
  9. 1 2 3 Crawford, Mark (2011). "Biologists Using Social-networking Sites to Boost Collaboration". BioScience 61 (9): 736–736. doi:10.1525/bio.2011.61.9.18. ISSN 0006-3568.
  10. 1 2 3 "About us". ResearchGate official web site. Retrieved 2016-04-09.
  11. 1 2 3 Scott, Mark (April 17, 2014). "Europeans look beyond their borders". Retrieved June 26, 2014.
  12. 1 2 3 Thelwall, M.; Kousha, K. (2014). "ResearchGate: Disseminating, communicating, and measuring Scholarship?". Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology 66 (5): n/a. doi:10.1002/asi.23236.
  13. 1 2 Yu, Min-Chun (February 2016). "ResearchGate: An effective altmetric indicator for active researchers?". Computers in Human Behavior 55: 1001–1006. doi:10.1016/j.chb.2015.11.007. Retrieved 22 April 2016.
  14. 1 2 3 Kraker, P., & Lex, E. A Critical Look at the ResearchGate Score as a Measure of Scientific Reputation. Quantifying and Analysing Scholarly Communication on the Web (ASCW'15)
  15. 1 2 3 Jordan, Katy (2015). Exploring the ResearchGate score as an academic metric: Reflections and implications for practice. Quantifying and Analysing Scholarly Communication on the Web (ASCW'15).
  16. ↑ Dolan, Kerry A. "How Ijad Madisch Aims To Disrupt Science Research With A Social Network". Lists. Forbes. Retrieved 9 August 2012.
  17. ↑ Young, Philip (2013-12-22). "Beyond Elsevier". Open@VT. Virginia Tech University Libraries. Retrieved 2014-06-29.
  18. ↑ "ResearchGate brings in strong funding round for 'scientific Facebook'". The Guardian. 2010. Retrieved 2010-08-09.
  19. 1 2 Imbert, Marguerite (2012-02-22). "Founders Fund invests in the Facebook for scientists: Founder Ijad Madisch on confidence, Luke Nosek, and what the world needs more of". VentureVillage.
  20. ↑ "Bill Gates, Benchmark And More Pour $35M Into ResearchGate, The Social Network For Scientists". TechCrunch. 2013-06-04. Retrieved 2013-06-08.
  21. ↑ Yeung, Ken (June 4, 2013). "'Facebook for scientists' ResearchGate raises $35M led by Bill Gates and prepares to release an API". The Next Web.
  22. 1 2 Hamm, Steve (December 7, 2009). "ResearchGATE and its Savvy use of the Web". BusinessWeek. Retrieved June 26, 2014.
  23. ↑ Madhusudhan, Margam (2012). "Use of social networking sites by research scholars of the University of Delhi: A study". The International Information & Library Review 44 (2): 100–113. doi:10.1016/j.iilr.2012.04.006. ISSN 1057-2317.
  24. ↑ Alheyasat, Omar (2015). "Examination expertise sharing in academic social networks using graphs: The case of ResearchGate" (PDF). Contemporary Engineering Sciences. doi:10.12988/ces.2015.515. (Note: predatory publisher)
  25. ↑ "Beware of enemies masquerading as friends: ResearchGate and co.". Swinburne Library Blog. Swinburne University of Technology. Retrieved 10 April 2014. ResearchGate automatically emails invitations to your coauthors on your behalf. These invitations are made to look as if they were sent by you but are emailed without your consent.
  26. 1 2 3 4 Meg Murray (2014). Analysis of a Scholarly Social Networking Site: The Case of the Dormant User. Proceedings of the Seventeenth Annual Conference of the Southern Association for Information Systems (SAIS).
  27. ↑ "Ein Vergleich für Forscher unter sich: Der Researchgate Score" (in German). 2012-10-09. Retrieved 2012-12-03.
  28. ↑ Hoffmann, C. P., Lutz, C., & Meckel, M. (2015). A relational altmetric? Network centrality on ResearchGate as an indicator of scientific impact. Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology.

External links

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