 | |
Type of site | Social network service for scientists |
|---|---|
| Available in | English |
| Headquarters | Berlin, Germany |
| Area served | Worldwide |
| Owner | ResearchGate GmbH |
| Created by |
|
| Industry | Internet |
| URL | www |
| Users |  25 million (September 2023[update])[1] |
| Launched | May 2008 (17 years ago) (2008-05) |
| Current status | active |
ResearchGate is a commercialsocial networking site for scientists and researchers[2] to share papers, ask and answer questions, and find collaborators.[3] According to a 2014 study byNature and a 2016 article inTimes Higher Education, it is the largest academic social network in terms of active users,[4][5] although other services have more registered users, and a 2015–2016 survey suggests that almost as many academics haveGoogle Scholar profiles.[6]
While reading articles does not require registration, people who wish to become site members 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.[7] Articles are free to read by visitors, however additional features (such as job postings or advertisements) are accessible only as a paid subscription. Members of the site each have auser 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 sendingunsolicited email invitations to coauthors of the articles listed on the site that were written to appear as if the email messages were sent by the other coauthors of the articles (a practice the site said it had discontinued as of November 2016[8]) and for automatically generating apparent profiles for non-users who have sometimes felt misrepresented by them.[5] A study found that over half of the uploaded papers appear to infringe copyright, because the authors uploaded thepublisher's version.[9]
The New York Times described the site as amashup ofFacebook,Twitter, andLinkedIn.[3] Site members may follow a research interest, in addition to following other individual members.[10] It has a blogging feature for users to write short reviews on peer-reviewed articles.[10] ResearchGate indexes self-published information on user profiles to suggest members to connect with others who have similar interests.[3] When a member posts a question, it is fielded to others that have identified on their user profile that they have a relevant expertise.[11] It also has private chat rooms where users can share data, edit shared documents, or discuss confidential topics.[12]The site also features a research-focusedjob board.[13]
As of 2020[update], it has more than 17 million users,[1] with its largest user-bases coming from Europe and North America.[14] Most of ResearchGate's users are involved in medicine or biology,[10][12] though it also has participants from engineering, law, computer science, agricultural sciences, and psychology, among others.[10]
ResearchGate published anauthor-level metric in the form of an "RG Score" since 2012.[15] RG score is not acitation impact measure. RG Scores have been reported to be correlated with existing author-level metrics, but have also beencriticized as having questionable reliability and an unknown calculation methodology.[16][17][18][19] In March 2022 ResearchGate announced they would remove the RG Score after July 2022.[15] ResearchGate does not charge fees for putting content on the site and does not requirepeer review.[20]
ResearchGate was founded in 2008[11] by virologistIjad Madisch, who remains the company's CEO,[4][3] with physician Sören Hofmayer, and computer scientist Horst Fickenscher.[13] It started inBoston, Massachusetts, and moved toBerlin, Germany, shortly afterwards.[14]
The company's first round of funding, in 2010, was led by the venture capital firmBenchmark.[21] Benchmark partnerMatt Cohler became a member of the board and participated in the decision to move to Berlin.[22]
The website began with few features, and developed based on input from scientists.[3] From 2009 to 2011, the number of users of the site grew from 25,000 to more than 1 million.[12]
A second round of funding led byPeter Thiel'sFounders Fund was announced in February 2012.[22]On June 4, 2013, it closedSeries C financing arrangements for $35M from investors includingBill Gates.[23][24]
The company grew from 12 employees in 2011 to 120 in 2014.[3][14] As of 2016, it had about 300 employees, including a sales staff of 100.[25]
ResearchGate's competitors includeAcademia.edu,Google Scholar, andMendeley,[4] as well as new competitors that emerged in the last decade likeSemantic Scholar. In 2016, Academia.edu reportedly had more registered users (about 34 million versus 11 million[25]) and higher web traffic, but ResearchGate was substantially larger in terms of active usage by researchers.[4][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.[4][5] In a 2015–2016 survey of academic profile tools, about as many respondents have ResearchGate profiles and Google Scholar profiles, but almost twice as many respondents use Google Scholar for search than use ResearchGate for accessing publications.[6]
Madisch has said the company's business strategy is focused onhighly 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".[4]
In November 2015 they acquired additional funding of $52.6 million from a range of investors includingGoldman Sachs,Benchmark Capital,Wellcome Trust and Bill Gates, but did not announce this until February 2017.[26][27] Losses increased from €5.4m in 2014 to €6.2m in 2015, but ResearchGate's CEO expressed optimism that they would break even eventually.[28]
ResearchGate,Elsevier andAmerican Chemical Society settled their lawsuit on 15 September 2023.[29][30]
As of January 2023, ResearchGate has partnered withSage to distributeopen access content.[31]
A 2009 article inBusinessWeek 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.[32] It said the website had become popular largely due to itsease of use. It also said that ResearchGate had been involved in several notable cross-country collaborations between scientists that led to substantive developments.[32]
Academic reception of ResearchGate remains generally positive, as recent reviews of extant literature show an accepting audience with broad coverage of concepts.[33] A 2012 paper published inThe 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 theUniversity of Delhi, but also "a majority of respondents said using SNSs [Social Networking Sites] may be a waste of time".[34]
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.[16]
In a 2014 study byNature, 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 byNature, coming second toGoogle 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 email.[5]
A 2016 article inTimes 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.[4] Another study reported that "relatively few academics appear to post questions and answers", but instead use it only as an "online CV".[19]
In the context of thebig deal cancellations by several library systems in the world, the wide usage of ResearchGate was credited as one of the factors which reduced the apparent value of the subscriptions totoll access resources.[35]Data analysis tools likeUnpaywall Journals, used by libraries to calculate the real costs and value of their options before such decisions,[36] allow to separate ResearchGate fromopen archives likeinstitutional repositories, which are considered more stable.
ResearchGate's decision to not remove convicted sex offenders from its social networking site has been criticized by Canadian authorities. Many researchers world-wide deleted their account in protest as they refused to remove convicted childpornographer and registeredsex offender inCanada,Ben Levin as a user. Identified on ResearchGate as "Research Ben", he had been a frequent user of ResearchGate, publishing over 80 papers of interest with the vast majority dealing with studies around child pornography andpedophiles.[37]
ResearchGate has been criticized for emailing unsolicited invitations to the coauthors of its users.[5]: Q2 [38] These emails were written as if they were personally sent by the user, but were instead sent automatically unless the useropted out,[5]: Q3 [39] which caused some researchers to boycott the service[5]: Q4 and contributes to the negative view of ResearchGate in the scientific community.[5]: Q5, Q7 As of November 2016,[40] the site appears to have discontinued this practice.[8] TheTechCrunch moderator Mike Butcher accused ResearchGate of having scraped competitors' websites for email addresses to spam, which the ResearchGate CEO denied.[28]
A study published by theAssociation for Information Systems in 2014 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.[39] Furthermore, journalists and researchers found that theRG score, calculated by ResearchGate via a proprietary algorithm,[39] can reach high values under questionable circumstances.[39][41]
Several studies have looked at the RG score, for which details about how it is calculated are not published. These studies concluded that the RG score was "intransparent and irreproducible",[18] criticized the way it incorporates thejournal impact factor into the user score, and suggested that it should "not be considered in the evaluation of academics".[18] The results were confirmed in a second "response" study, which also found the score to depend mostly on journal impact factors.[19] The RG score was found to be negatively correlated with network centrality,[42] 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 withQuacquarelli Symonds university rankings at the institutional level, but only weakly withElsevier SciVal rankings of individual authors.[17] While it was found to be correlated with different university rankings, the correlation in between these rankings themselves was higher.[16]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 findPDF 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.[citation needed]
ResearchGate has been criticized for failing to provide safeguards against "the dark side of academic writing", including such phenomena as fake publishers, "ghost journals", publishers with"predatory" publication fees, and fake impact ratings.[43] It has also been criticized for copyright infringement of published works.[44][9][45]
In September 2017, lawyers representing theInternational Association of Scientific, Technical, and Medical Publishers (STM) sent a letter to ResearchGate threatening legal action against them for copyright infringement and demanding that they alter their handling of uploaded articles to include pre-release checking for copyright violations and "Specifically, [for ResearchGate to] end its extraction of content from hosted articles and the modification of any hosted content, including any and all metadata. It would also mean an end to Researchgate's own copying and downloading of published journal article content and the creation of internal databases of articles."[46][47][48] This was followed by an announcement thattakedown requests are to be issued to ResearchGate forcopyright infringement relating to millions of articles.[49][50][51][52][53] A statement supporting the action was issued by a group called Coalition for Responsible Sharing, and the statement was signed by theAmerican Chemical Society,Brill Publishers,Elsevier,Wiley, andWolters Kluwer.[54] Subsequently, Coalition for Responsible Sharing (CfRS) reported that "ResearchGate has removed from public view a significant number of copyrighted articles it is hosting on its site".[55] CfRS also confirmed that "not all violations have been addressed" and as such,takedown notices have been issued.[56]
ResearchGate has managed to achieve an agreement on article uploading with three other major publishers,Springer Nature,Cambridge University Press andThieme. Under the agreement, the publishers will be notified when their articles are uploaded but will not be able to premoderate uploads.[57]
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.
ResearchGate more recently, has been lenient in its policies against this dark side of academic writing.
