ResearchGate: Disseminating, communicating, and measuring Scholarship?

@article{Thelwall2015ResearchGateDC,
  title={ResearchGate: Disseminating, communicating, and measuring Scholarship?},
  author={Mike A Thelwall and Kayvan Kousha},
  journal={Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology},
  year={2015},
  volume={66}
}
  • M. ThelwallK. Kousha
  • Published 1 May 2015
  • Education
  • Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology
ResearchGate is a social network site for academics to create their own profiles, list their publications, and interact with each other. Like Academia.edu, it provides a new way for scholars to disseminate their work and hence potentially changes the dynamics of informal scholarly communication. This article assesses whether ResearchGate usage and publication data broadly reflect existing academic hierarchies and whether individual countries are set to benefit or lose out from the site. The… 
View on Wiley
scit.wlv.ac.uk
268 Citations
Highly Influential Citations
17
Background Citations
95
Methods Citations
20
Results Citations
7

268 Citations

Research universities on the ResearchGate social networking site: An examination of institutional differences, research activity level, and social networks formed

A ResearchGate-way to an international academic community?

The study finds that while RG is largely perceived as valuable for participants, use is unbalanced toward knowledge sharing, which is further limited to posting English-language outputs and accessing literature for personal consumption, and RG may be positioned as a tool rather than a community, the latter requiring a more balanced engagement with the platform, particularly in the networking area.

Research output availability on academic social networks: implications for stakeholders in academic publishing

A multi-method case study of one business school and a discussion about the implications that the current trajectory of ASN use has on major stakeholders in academic publishing are discussed.

Making Academic Social Capital Visible

It is proposed that relational analyses of social media platforms may shed new light on these understudied dimensions of scientific impact and may enrich assessment efforts.

ResearchGate and Academia.edu as networked socio-technical systems for scholarly communication: a literature review

The aim is to describe the status of the research and to identify gaps and priorities in the areas of scholarly networked learning and shared knowledge, and to point to the need for specific research on open and distributed learning achieved in ASNS according to a networkedlearning perspective.

How does scholarly use of academic social networking sites differ by academic discipline? A case study using ResearchGate

Utilising content marketing metrics and social networks for academic visibility

There are numerous assumptions on research evaluation in terms of quality and relevance of academic contributions. Researchers are becoming increasingly acquainted with bibliometric indicators,…

New ways of building, showcasing, and measuring scholarly reputation

The main findings were: (a) it is early days and uptake is light and patchy with platforms largely used for non‐reputational purposes, such as sharing documents; (b) most users were passive and did not fully engage with the social aspects of the platforms; and young researchers are set to profit most from the emerging platforms.

Managing Academic Profiles on Scientific Social Networks

The presence of Spanish communication scholars in two academic networks: ResearchGate and Academia.edu is explored to assess the introduction, use, management, popularity, influence, and impact of these social academic networks.

From Finding a Niche to Circumventing Institutional Constraints

  • Katy Jordan
  • Business
    The International Review of Research in Open and Distributed Learning
  • 2019
Academics are increasingly encouraged to use social media in their professional lives. Social networking sites are one type of tool within this; the ability to connect with others through this medium…
...

References

SHOWING 1-10 OF 65 REFERENCES

Academia.edu: Social network or Academic Network?

Academic social network sites Academia.edu and ResearchGate, and reference sharing sites Mendeley, Bibsonomy, Zotero, and CiteULike, give scholars the ability to publicize their research outputs and…

Beyond citations: Scholars' visibility on the social Web

Web presence widespread and diverse and social reference manager bookmarks are compared to Scopus and Web of Science citations; it is found that Mendeley covers more than 80% of sampled articles, and that MendEley bookmark counts are significantly correlated toScopus citation counts.

Coverage and adoption of altmetrics sources in the bibliometric community

Findings suggest that some online tools are seeing substantial use by bibliometricians, and that they present a potentially valuable source of impact data.

Validating online reference managers for scholarly impact measurement

This paper investigates whether CiteULike and Mendeley are useful for measuring scholarly influence, using a sample of 1,613 papers published in Nature and Science in 2007. Traditional citation…

Evaluating altmetrics

A range of methods are needed for altmetric evaluations, that the methods should focus on identifying the relative strengths of influences on altmetrics creation, and that such evaluations should be prioritised in a logical order.

Language biases in the coverage of the Science Citation Index and its consequencesfor international comparisons of national research performance

The authors conclude that the value of impact indicators of research activities at the level of an institution or a country strongly depend upon whether one includes research publications in SCI covered journals written in other languages than in English.

Meta-analysis in social research

National study of information seeking behavior of academic researchers in the United States

To understand different aspects of researchers’ information-seeking behavior, 2,063 academic researchers in natural science, engineering, and medical science from five research universities in the United States were surveyed.

Do Altmetrics Work? Twitter and Ten Other Social Web Services

Comparisons between citations and metric values for articles published at different times, even within the same year, can remove or reverse this association and so publishers and scientometricians should consider the effect of time when using altmetrics to rank articles.

Tweeting Links to Academic Articles

Tweets containing links to scholarly articles generally provide little more than publicity, and so whilst tweet counts may provide evidence of the popularity of an article, the contents of the tweets themselves are unlikely to give deep insights into scientists' reactions to publications, except perhaps in special cases.
...