Abstract
Based on a survey, the following study investigates opinions and also usage patterns relating to the ResearchGate social networking site for scientists and researchers. The survey consisted of 19 questions and was conducted online with 695 scientists from the disciplines of physics, biology, medicine, and neuroscience. Amongst other issues, the research questions concerned how much time and effort the interviewees expended on ResearchGate, what added value they perceived in using the site, the extent to which social aspects influence use, how participants planned to use the platform in future, and what role ResearchGate’s own metric, the RG score, played for the scientists. In addition, we discuss which of the factors of age, sex, origin, and scientific discipline have a decisive influence on the responses of the interviewees and which are of no statistical significance The results clearly show that the origin of the participants is frequently decisive, but that the remaining factors also have a considerable influence on the responses for more than 25% of the questions.
Highlights
The wide range of possibilities offered by Science 2.0 means that scientists have many opportunities of managing and discussing their scientific output by managing bibliographic data, releasing their own publications online, or exchanging ideas with other scientists in social networks
The empirical results of this investigation convey an impression of how the ResearchGate social networking site is perceived by its users from the world of science, what value it has in their everyday work, and what role metrics such as the RG score play for scientists
The survey participants seemed to spend very little time on searches and on updating their profiles largely because ResearchGate does not seem to be the first port of call for scientific searches and since ResearchGate itself simplifies profile updates
Summary
The wide range of possibilities offered by Science 2.0 means that scientists have many opportunities of managing and discussing their scientific output by managing bibliographic data, releasing their own publications online, or exchanging ideas with other scientists in social networks For this purpose, researchers can make use of a wide range of diverse portals such as Academia.edu, ResearchGate, Mendeley, Bibsonomy, CiteULike and Zotero [1,2]. The network has its own impact indicator, the RG score, which is a type of unique selling point with respect to composite indicators among the social platforms This score combines several dimensions including the influence of the user’s scientific publications and their social activities on ResearchGate [4]. It is possible to achieve a high RG score without having a single scholarly publication since moderate social activity is sufficient
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