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ResearchGate
ResearchGate-Logo
Type of site
Social network service for scientists
OwnerResearchGate, Berlin, Germany
Created byIjad Madisch, Sören Hofmayer, Horst Fickenscher
URLhttp://researchgate.net/
Users8 million[1][better source needed]

ResearchGate is a social networking site for scientists and researchers[3] to share papers, ask and answer questions, and find collaborators.[4] It is the largest network for scientists, research professionals and affiliated people.[5]

ResearchGate was founded in 2008[6] by virologist and computer scientist Ijad Madisch.[4] It started in Boston, and moved to Berlin, Germany, shortly afterwards.[7] In 2009, the company began a partnership with Seeding Labs in order to supply third-world countries with surplus lab equipment from the United States.[8]

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] In 2013, it closed Series C financing for $35M from investors including Bill Gates. The company grew from 12 employees in 2011 to 120 in 2014.[4][7]

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.[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 those who have similar interests.[4] When a user posts a question, it is fielded to scientists that have identified on their user profile that they have a relevant expertise.[6] It also has private chat rooms where scientists can share data, edit shared documents, or discuss confidential topics.[9]

As of 2015, it claims to have 7 million users,[1][dubious – discuss] but only about a sixth of these have filled out their position and uploaded a picture.[11] ResearchGate's largest user-base is in Europe and North America.[7] Most of ResearchGate's users are involved in medicine or biology,[9][10] though it also has participants from engineering, computer science and agricultural sciences, psychology, among others.[10] ResearchGate statistics seem to largely reproduce traditional academic reputations based on citation indexes.[12]

ResearchGate does not require peer review or fees.[13] Since accessing documents usually requires an account, ResearchGate is not considered to be open access.[14] The "Open Review" functionality, which allows for reviewing published work, is little used: in a study, only 4 out of 3407 users had used this function.[11]

Reception

As of 2009, according to BusinessWeek, ResearchGate was influential[dubious – discuss] in promoting innovation in developing countries by connecting scientists from those nations with their peers in industrialized nations.[8] BusinessWeek said the website had become popular largely due to its "navigation" and "ease of use". It also noted that ResearchGate had been involved in "a string" of notable cross-country collaborations between scientists that led to substantive developments.[8] A paper published in the The International Information & Library Review conducted a survey with 160 respondents and found that out of those 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".[15] Another study found that only a small fraction of users (about 85000) were active in the Q&A part of the site.[16]

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

Criticisms

ResearchGate has been criticized for emailing unsolicited invitations to the coauthors of its users.[17] These emails are written as if they were personally sent by the user, but they are sent automatically unless the user opts out,[18] which causes some researchers to boycott the service because of this marketing tactic.[19]

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.[18] Furthermore, journalists and researchers have found that the "RG score", calculated by ResearchGate via a proprietary algorithm,[18] can reach high values under questionable circumstances.[18][20]

A study by the Graz University of Technology concluded that the RG score was "intransparent and irreproducible",[21] criticized the way it incorporates the journal impact factor into the user score, and suggested that it should not be considered a serious metric. The RG score was found to be negatively correlated with network centrality,[22] i.e., that users that are the most active (and thus central to the network) on ResearchGate usually do not have high RG scores.

A study found that most RG users "do not care about sharing their expertise"[16] and that only about 85000 users are active on the platform,[16] and tend to ask, but not answer, questions. Most of the questions did not receive answers. A similar, independent study[11] came to similar conclusions: only 6.6% of users were found to have ever asked or answered a question, and only 1.1% then asked a second question.

ResearchGate uses a crawler to find PDF versions of articles on the homepages of authors and publishers. These are then presented as if they had been uploaded to the web site by the author: the PDF will be displayed embedded in a frame, only the button "External Download" indicates that the file was in fact not uploaded to researchgate. It is not documented which robots.txt directive would prevent the researchgate bot from doing this.

Funding

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.[23] Benchmark partner Matt Cohler became a member of the board and participated in the decision to move to Berlin.[24]

A second round of funding led by Peter Thiel's Founders Fund was announced in February 2012.[24] On June 4, 2013, it closed Series C financing for $35M from investors including Bill Gates.[25][26]

See also

References

  1. ^ a b "8 out of 8 million", ResearchGate 21 October 2015
  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. ^ a b c d e f Lin, Thomas (16 January 2012). "Cracking open the scientific process". The New York Times. Retrieved 26 June 2014.
  5. ^ [www.leeds.ac.uk/comms/for_staff/Researchgate.pdf "ResearchGate sheet"] (PDF). University of Leeds. Retrieved 12 February 2016. {{cite web}}: Check |url= value (help)
  6. ^ a b Hardy, Quentin (August 3, 2012). "Failure Is the Next Opportunity". Retrieved June 26, 2014.
  7. ^ a b c Scott, Mark (April 17, 2014). "Europeans look beyond their borders". Retrieved June 26, 2014.
  8. ^ a b c Hamm, Steve (December 7, 2009). "ResearchGATE and its Savvy use of the Web". BusinessWeek. Retrieved June 26, 2014.
  9. ^ a b c 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. ^ a b c d Diane Rasmussen Neal (6 August 2012). Social Media for Academics: A Practical Guide. Elsevier Science. p. 28. ISBN 978-1-78063-319-0.
  11. ^ a b c Roger, Salman Samson (2015-03-02). "How do scientists share on academic social networks like ResearchGate?". blog.sciencebite.com. Retrieved 2015-06-06.
  12. ^ a b Thelwall, M.; Kousha, K. (2014). "Research Gate: Disseminating, communicating, and measuring Scholarship?". Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology. 66 (5): n/a. doi:10.1002/asi.23236.
  13. ^ Dolan, Kerry A. "How Ijad Madisch Aims To Disrupt Science Research With A Social Network". Lists. Forbes. Retrieved 9 August 2012.
  14. ^ Young, Philip (2013-12-22). "Beyond Elsevier". Open@VT. Virginia Tech University Libraries. Retrieved 2014-06-29.
  15. ^ 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.
  16. ^ a b c Alheyasat, O. (2015). Examination Expertise Sharing in Academic Social Networks Using Graphs: The Case of ResearchGate. "Examination expertise sharing in academic social networks using graphs: The case of Research Gate". Contemporary Engineering Sciences. 2015. doi:10.12988/ces.2015.515.
  17. ^ "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.
  18. ^ a b c d 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).
  19. ^ "Online collaboration: Scientists and the social network". Nature. 2014-08-13. Retrieved 2014-11-06. Some irritated scientists say that the site taps into human instincts only too well – by regularly sending out automated e-mails that profess to come from colleagues active on the site, thus luring others to join on false pretences. (Indeed, 35% of regular ResearchGate users in Nature's survey said that they joined the site because they received an e-mail.) Lars Arvestad, a computer scientist at Stockholm University, is fed up with the tactic. "I think it is a disgraceful kind of marketing and I am choosing not to use their service because of that", he said. 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.
  20. ^ "Ein Vergleich für Forscher unter sich: Der Researchgate Score" (in German). 2012-10-09. Retrieved 2012-12-03.
  21. ^ 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)
  22. ^ 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.
  23. ^ "ResearchGate brings in strong funding round for 'scientific Facebook'". The Guardian. 2010. Retrieved 2010-08-09.
  24. ^ a b 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.
  25. ^ "Bill Gates, Benchmark And More Pour $35M Into ResearchGate, The Social Network For Scientists". TechCrunch. 2013-06-04. Retrieved 2013-06-08.
  26. ^ Yeung, Ken (June 4, 2013). "ResearchGate, the social network for scientists, has raised $35 million in Series C funding led". The Next Web.
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