Ten years of research on ResearchGate: a scoping review using Google Scholar (2008–2017)

Abstract

Objective: To analyse quantitatively the articles published during 2008–2017 about the academic social networking site ResearchGate. Methods: A scoping bibliometric review of documents retrieved using Google Scholar was conducted, limited to publications that contained the word ‘ResearchGate’ in their title and were published from 2008 to 2017. Results: The search yielded 159 documents, once a preliminary list of 386 documents retrieved from Google Scholar was filtered, which eliminated about 60% of the results that were bibliographic citations and not documents. Papers in journals were the most numerous type of documents (n = 73; 46%), followed by conference papers (n = 31; 19.5%). Contributing eight publications, two Spanish scholars (Delgado Lopez-Cozar and OrdunaMalea, who were co-authors in each case) were the most prolific authors writing on this topic during the ten-year period. The keywords most used in the documents were ‘ResearchGate’ and ‘Altmetrics’. The publications were cited frequently since 2014 (more than 90% of the total cites fell in that period), and those with more than one author were the most cited ones. The authors of the documents were mainly librarians and information science professionals, who wrote primarily as co-authors with colleagues fromtheir own institutions, mostly published in English. Conclusions: Interest in ResearchGate has grown since 2015, as evident from the number of articles published and the citations they received. Keywords: Academic social networks, bibliometrics, scholarly communication