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ResearchGate can connect you with content and researchers that you’ll find valuable to your own work.

ResearchGate is a social networking site connecting researchers throughout the world by allowing them to share publications, and information. This guide provides an introduction to ResearchGate and contains information about some of the most useful features to help researchers and professors creating a ResearchGate profile.  ​

ResearchGate  was started by two researchers Dr. Ijad Madisch and Dr. Sören Hofmayer, and computer scientist Horst Fickenscher.  ResearchGate today has more than 7 million members. 

Here's a quick tour of a ResearchGate profile

A ResearchGate profile is an overview of a researcher’s work: their publications, professional expertise, institutions, contributions, and all the questions they have answered on the website. Researchers can show their peers current projects. 

Here is an example of a ResearchGate Profile.

Researcher: Yuanchang Xie

Screenshot of Yuanchang Xie’s profile was taken on the 20th of July 2015.

Publication is one of the most useful features on ResearchGate: whether you are adding your research (Journal articles, conference papers,etc.), looking for research in your field, or downloading other researcher’s work.

Here is an example of ResearchGate publications.

Screenshot of Yuanchang Xie’s profile was taken on the 20th of July 2015

Ask research-related questions answered by other specialists. Share your knowledge, connect with researchers, and identify yourself as an expert in your field.

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• Last Updated: Oct 31, 2022 1:50 PM
• URL: https://libguides.uml.edu/c.php?g=334810

This Bill Gates-backed tech startup is on a mission to fundamentally change the way scientists work

Meet Ijad Madisch. He's a Berlin-based entrepreneur on a mission to change the way scientists go about their research.

The computer science graduate and qualified doctor set up a company called ResearchGate in 2008 when he realised that scientists were making the same mistakes over and over again as a result of not sharing their work publicly.

"It's one of the biggest problems we have in the world, especially if we are repeating mistakes made by other scientists that cost us a lot of time and money," Madisch told Business Insider.

ResearchGate can be described as a social network for scientists. It started off as a free-to-use platform for academics but it's become increasingly popular with scientists working in corporates, including tech firms like Google and Facebook. There are currently 1,145 Google employees registered on the platform and 199 Facebook employees . In total, ResearchGate boasts over 10 million users.

"ResearchGate has become the biggest and most active scientific social network in the world over the last couple of years," claims Madisch. "From the beginning, the focus was on convincing scientists to share publication data."

The company claims not to have any competitors but it's worth noting that it was compared to London's Mendeley and San Francisco's Academia.edu in a Times Higher Education article that was published in April.

Tackling the world's big problems with online 'Projects'

Over the last eight years, tens of millions of pieces of scientific information have been uploaded onto ResearchGate's platform and today more than two million scientific publications are uploaded every month. In addition to publications, scientists are also uploading general articles, conference papers, and raw data.

Now the company wants to make it even easier for scientists to collaborate on chunky problems like climate change and illnesses like HIV and cancer.

"Recently we launched a 'Project' feature where scientists can collaborate in real time and document what they have found within the experiment," said Madisch.

"I envision a different way of publishing and documenting science in the future where you’re not going for results any more in larger articles but rather in way smaller updates where you don’t have to write the same things again and again."

The Projects allow ResearchGate members to talk directly to the scientists running the experiments, possibly giving them feedback and making suggestions in the process. "Ultimately, the Projects give us a way to structure science better," said Madisch, before going on to claim that they also make it easier for scientists to find similar studies to those that they're working on themselves.

More than 140,000 Projects have been launched since the feature went live approximately five months ago, Madisch said, adding: "This is a total new direction."

Related stories

One ongoing Project includes Nasa scientists who are using ResearchGate's platform to document their time in an isolated bubble on the side of a volcano in Hawaii, where conditions are designed to replicate those found on Mars.

While in the bubble, the scientists' internet access is highly restricted but ResearchGate is one of the few websites they are able to use to share what they’re working on.

Other ResearchGate Projects are aiming to tackle everything from avian influenza (bird flu) and malaria, to obesity and 3D-printing.

More than 200 employees

As ResearchGate's userbase has ballooned, the company's workforce has been forced to expand, with the headcount more than doubling over the last year from around 100 to 250.

The growth of the company has been fuelled by investors who believe in the ResearchGate mission.

The size of ResearchGate's initial fund raises were not disclosed but the company raised $35 million (£26.3 million) in July 2013 in a round that was lead by Microsoft billionaire Bill Gates and venture capital firm Tenaya Capital.

But it hasn't always been easy for ResearchGate to raise money.

ResearchGate is free to sign up to and company's path to monetisation was called into question by early investors.

In 2008 and 2009, VCs were asking Madisch how he planned to make money. "I said: 'Hey guys, you don’t get it. If this thing is going to be successful, if we change how scientists think — something that is way harder than making money with this network — then the potential is big.'"

That said, ResearchGate is now making money from selling job recruitment space to companies and individuals who want to tap into the company's intelligent network. "We have 2,500 different institutions who have posted a job on ResearchGate," said Madisch.

ResearchGate is also thinking about launching "a marketplace for lab services and lab equipment," according to Madisch, who says the market is worth $30 billion (£23 billion) in the US alone.

Another one of the company's investors is Silicon Valley venture capitalist and former Facebook VP Matt Cohler, who is now general partner at Benchmark.

"He (Cohler) didn’t ask how I wanted to make money," said Madisch. "He asked me what my personal goal was with ResearchGate and I said I want to win the Nobel Prize and he understood that."

While many startups are look to exit when they get to a certain size, ResearchGate plans to play the long game. "Our plan is ultimately to stay independent," said Madisch.

Watch: Bill Gates has a net worth of over $96 billion — here's how he makes and spends his money

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Understanding Academia.edu and ResearchGate

← go back to the impact challenge table of contents.

We’ll be honest – we thought long and hard about including this chapter and its activities in the OU Impact Challenge. Academia.edu and ResearchGate both seem attractive to scholars, but they also have their share of disadvantages and downsides.    Ultimately, we decided to include this information, because so many of you at OU have accounts on these two sites. A quick search turns up 3,849 OU-affiliated users on Academia.edu and 4,731 on ResearchGate! But instead of diving right into the “how tos,” we think it’s especially important to place these two sites into context and preface them with important considerations.

Consideration #1: You Are Not the Customer

Consideration #2: You Might Be Breaking the Law

Another consideration with these particular services is the legality of uploading your work there. Most publishers require authors to sign a publication agreement/copyright transfer prior to a manuscript being published which outlines what you can/cannot do with your own work in the future (we will cover this in Chapter 11 of the OU Impact Challenge). Uploading your work – especially a publisher’s pdf – to a site such as Academia.edu or ResearchGate may be a violation of the terms of the publishing agreement, whereas uploading it to an institutional repository may not be (or can be negotiated not to be). Several years ago, a major academic publisher actively went after Academia.edu, requiring them to take down all of the publisher’s content that had been illegally uploaded, much to the surprise and dismay of these authors. And Academia.edu is not the only target . Earlier this year ResearchGate was set to take down nearly 7 million articles or about 40% of their content.

Consideration #3: Understand the Privacy Implications

Finally, some of these sites’ tactics are troubling from the standpoint of privacy and intellectual freedom. Personally and professionally, many find it distressing that a private company, which doesn’t adhere to the same professional ethics as librarians and other scholars do, collects information about who is reading what. Academia.edu, in particular, then offers to share that information with you if you subscribe to their “premium service.” And while their analytics dashboard doesn’t reveal readers’ names, it may provide enough information for you to know exactly who read your work.    You may decide not to pay for Academia.edu’s premium service, but even so – what you view and download will still be tracked. This may not be troubling to you (the “I’m not doing anything wrong, so I don’t care” argument), but we think it sets a bad precedent. What about tracking researchers who study terrorism? Or whistleblowing? Or even climate change? How might people at these academic social media companies create profiles and make judgments about you based on what you are reading? And what will they do with the information they collect, especially if asked for it by government entities?    We’ve posted some additional reading and resources below. And we will continue to cover some of these topics in the future, since they are highly relevant to sharing scholarly work. If you’re still interested in Academia.edu and/or ResearchGate after reading these articles, we’ve gone ahead and included those activities further down below. We’ve purposefully kept these activities brief, at least for now.     

• A Social Networking Site is Not an Open Access Repository , by Katie Fortney and Justin Gonder
• I Have a Lot of Questions: RG, ELS, SN, STM, and CRS , by Lisa Janicke Hinchliffe
• Dear Scholars, Delete Your Account At Academia.Edu , by Sarah Bond
• Academia, Not Edu , by Kathleen Fitzpatrick
• Reading, Privacy, and Scholarly Networks , by Kathleen Fitzpatrick
• Upon Leaving Academia.edu , by G. Geltner
• Should You #DeleteAcademiaEdu , by Paolo Mangiafico
• Should This Be the Last Thing You Read on Academia.edu? , by Gary Hall (downloads as a .pdf)

Make Profiles on Academia.edu and ResearchGate

You know all those things you wish your CV was smart enough to do – embed your papers, automatically give you readership statistics, and so on? Academia.edu and ResearchGate are two academic social networks that allow you to do these things and then some.    They’re also places where your some of your colleagues are spending their time. Actively participating on one or both networks may give you an opportunity to have greater reach with other researchers. And getting your publications and presentations onto these sites legally will make it easier for others to encounter your work. They do this not only through the social network they help you build, but also by improving the search engine optimization (SEO) of your research, making you much more “Googleable.”    Both platforms allow you to do the following:     

• Create a profile that summarizes your research
• Upload your publications, so others can find them
• Find and follow other researchers, so you can receive automatic updates on their new publications
• Find and read others’ publications
• See platform-specific metrics that indicate the readership and reach you have on those sites

Let’s dig into the basics of setting up profiles and uploading your work on these sites.

Getting Started on Academia.edu

Fill Out Your Profile

Now it’s time to add your OU affiliation and interests to your profile. Adding an OU affiliation will add you to a subdomain of Academia.edu which will allow you to more easily find your colleagues. The site will try to guess your affiliation based on your email address or IP address; make any corrections needed and add your department information and title.    Then, add your research interests. These are also important; they’ll help others find you and your work.

Connect With Others

Now let’s connect with your colleagues who are already on Academia.edu. You can either connect your Facebook account or an email account to Academia.edu, which will search your contacts and suggest connections.    You now have an Academia.edu profile! You can continue to spruce it up by adding more publications, as well as adding a photo of yourself, other research interests and publications, and connecting your Academia profile to the other services we’ve covered like ORCiD , GoogleScholar , Twitter , and LinkedIn . See how this might be coming together?!?

Academia.edu Homework

Now that you have a profile, set aside half an hour to explore two uses of Academia.edu:     

• Exploring “research interests” in order to discover other researchers and publications; and
• Getting more of your most important publications online; and

Make a Profile on ResearchGate

Next, we’ll help you with the other major player in the scholarly social network space, ResearchGate. ResearchGate claims 15 million users, and it will help you connect with many researchers who aren’t on Academia.edu. It can also help you understand your readers through platform-specific metrics, and confirm your status as a helpful expert in your field with their “Q&A” feature.    Given ResearchGate’s similarity to Academia.edu, we won’t rehash the basics of setting up a profile and getting your publications online. Go ahead and sign up, set up your account (remember to add detailed affiliation information and a photo), and add a publication or two.    Got your basic profile up and running? Great! Let’s drill down into those three unique features of ResearchGate.

Find other researchers & publications

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ResearchGate Score & Stats

Limitations

We’ve covered many of the limitations of Academia.edu and ResearchGate in the first section of this chapter. But there is yet another one. It has been pointed out that Academia.edu and ResearchGate are information silos – you put information and effort into the site, but you can’t easily extract and reuse it later. This is absolutely correct. That’s a big downside of these services and a great reason to make sure you’ve claimed your ORCiD in Chapter 1 .    One solution to this drawback (and the ones mentioned above) is to limit the amount of time you spend adding new content to your profiles on these sites, and instead use them as a kind of “landing page” that can simply help others find you and three or four of your most important publications. Even if you don’t have all your publications on either site, their social networking features may still be useful to make connections and increase readership for your most important work.

ResearchGate Homework

Content for the OU Impact Challenge has been derived from “ The 30-Day Impact Challenge ” by Stacy Konkiel © ImpactStory and used here under a CC BY 4.0 International License.

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