IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/spr/scient/v119y2019i2d10.1007_s11192-019-03063-6.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

ResearchGate Score, full-text research items, and full-text reads: a follow-up study

Author

Listed:
  • Sergio Copiello

    (IUAV University of Venice)

  • Pietro Bonifaci

    (Ministry of Cultural Heritage and Activities)

Abstract

This contribution focuses on the scholarly social network ResearchGate (RG). We take the cue from a recent change in the information shown on each researcher’s profile page, which now discloses the number of full-text reads, in addition to the already provided number of overall reads. Building on the findings of two previous studies (Orduna-Malea et al. in Scientometrics 112(1):443–460, 2017. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-017-2396-9 ; Copiello and Bonifaci in Scientometrics 114(1):301–306, 2018. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-017-2582-9 ), we delve into the relationship among full-text research items uploaded in that platform, full-text reads of the same items, and the so-called RG Score. The dataset examined here provides conflicting results. Firstly, the number of full-text publications and reads is significantly different, along with the RG Score, for the analyzed samples. Secondly, the RG Score implicitly rewards the ratio between the full-texts available to users and total research items. Moreover, the same score seems to be affected to a greater degree by the level of overall reads. However, apart from an indirect relationship, it does not reward how much attention the full-texts get in comparison to the other research items featured in the scholars’ profile pages.

Suggested Citation

  • Sergio Copiello & Pietro Bonifaci, 2019. "ResearchGate Score, full-text research items, and full-text reads: a follow-up study," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 119(2), pages 1255-1262, May.
    • Handle: RePEc:spr:scient:v:119:y:2019:i:2:d:10.1007_s11192-019-03063-6
    DOI: 10.1007/s11192-019-03063-6
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s11192-019-03063-6
    File Function: Abstract
    Download Restriction: Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1007/s11192-019-03063-6?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Xianwen Wang & Zhi Wang & Shenmeng Xu, 2013. "Tracing scientist’s research trends realtimely," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 95(2), pages 717-729, May.
    2. Todd Dewett & Angelo S. Denisi, 2004. "Exploring scholarly reputation: It's more than just productivity," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 60(2), pages 249-272, June.
    3. Hamid R. Jamali, 2017. "Copyright compliance and infringement in ResearchGate full-text journal articles," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 112(1), pages 241-254, July.
    4. Christian Pieter Hoffmann & Christoph Lutz & Miriam Meckel, 2016. "A relational altmetric? Network centrality on ResearchGate as an indicator of scientific impact," Journal of the Association for Information Science & Technology, Association for Information Science & Technology, vol. 67(4), pages 765-775, April.
    5. Christian Gumpenberger & Wolfgang Glänzel & Juan Gorraiz, 2016. "The ecstasy and the agony of the altmetric score," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 108(2), pages 977-982, August.
    6. Pardeep Sud & Mike Thelwall, 2014. "Evaluating altmetrics," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 98(2), pages 1131-1143, February.
    7. Yan, Weiwei & Zhang, Yin, 2018. "Research universities on the ResearchGate social networking site: An examination of institutional differences, research activity level, and social networks formed," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 12(1), pages 385-400.
    8. Stefanie Haustein & Isabella Peters & Judit Bar-Ilan & Jason Priem & Hadas Shema & Jens Terliesner, 2014. "Coverage and adoption of altmetrics sources in the bibliometric community," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 101(2), pages 1145-1163, November.
    9. Stefanie Haustein & Timothy D. Bowman & Kim Holmberg & Andrew Tsou & Cassidy R. Sugimoto & Vincent Larivière, 2016. "Tweets as impact indicators: Examining the implications of automated “bot” accounts on Twitter," Journal of the Association for Information Science & Technology, Association for Information Science & Technology, vol. 67(1), pages 232-238, January.
    10. Ortega, José Luis, 2015. "Relationship between altmetric and bibliometric indicators across academic social sites: The case of CSIC's members," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 9(1), pages 39-49.
    11. Hamid R. Jamali & David Nicholas & Eti Herman, 2016. "Scholarly reputation in the digital age and the role of emerging platforms and mechanisms," Research Evaluation, Oxford University Press, vol. 25(1), pages 37-49.
    12. Martín-Martín, Alberto & Orduna-Malea, Enrique & Delgado López-Cózar, Emilio, 2018. "Author-level metrics in the new academic profile platforms: The online behaviour of the Bibliometrics community," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 12(2), pages 494-509.
    13. Weiwei Yan & Yin Zhang & Wendy Bromfield, 2018. "Analyzing the follower–followee ratio to determine user characteristics and institutional participation differences among research universities on ResearchGate," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 115(1), pages 299-316, April.
    14. Mike Thelwall & Kayvan Kousha, 2017. "ResearchGate articles: Age, discipline, audience size, and impact," Journal of the Association for Information Science & Technology, Association for Information Science & Technology, vol. 68(2), pages 468-479, February.
    15. Enrique Orduna-Malea & Alberto Martín-Martín & Mike Thelwall & Emilio Delgado López-Cózar, 2017. "Do ResearchGate Scores create ghost academic reputations?," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 112(1), pages 443-460, July.
    16. Mike Thelwall & Kayvan Kousha, 2015. "ResearchGate: Disseminating, communicating, and measuring Scholarship?," Journal of the Association for Information Science & Technology, Association for Information Science & Technology, vol. 66(5), pages 876-889, May.
    17. Lepori, Benedetto & Thelwall, Michael & Hoorani, Bareerah Hafeez, 2018. "Which US and European Higher Education Institutions are visible in ResearchGate and what affects their RG score?," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 12(3), pages 806-818.
    18. Mojisola Erdt & Aarthy Nagarajan & Sei-Ching Joanna Sin & Yin-Leng Theng, 2016. "Altmetrics: an analysis of the state-of-the-art in measuring research impact on social media," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 109(2), pages 1117-1166, November.
    19. Lutz Bornmann & Robin Haunschild, 2017. "Does evaluative scientometrics lose its main focus on scientific quality by the new orientation towards societal impact?," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 110(2), pages 937-943, February.
    20. Richard Van Noorden, 2014. "Online collaboration: Scientists and the social network," Nature, Nature, vol. 512(7513), pages 126-129, August.
    21. Sergio Copiello & Pietro Bonifaci, 2018. "A few remarks on ResearchGate score and academic reputation," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 114(1), pages 301-306, January.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Salim Moussa, 2021. "Citation contagion: a citation analysis of selected predatory marketing journals," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 126(1), pages 485-506, January.
    2. Sergio Copiello, 2020. "Multi-criteria altmetric scores are likely to be redundant with respect to a subset of the underlying information," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 124(1), pages 819-824, July.
    3. Vivek Kumar Singh & Satya Swarup Srichandan & Hiran H. Lathabai, 2022. "ResearchGate and Google Scholar: how much do they differ in publications, citations and different metrics and why?," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 127(3), pages 1515-1542, March.
    4. Zhang, Min & Zhang, Dongxin & Zhang, Yin & Yeager, Kristin & Fields, Taylor N., 2023. "An exploratory study of Twitter metrics for measuring user influence," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 17(4).
    5. Łukasz Wiechetek & Zbigniew Pastuszak, 2022. "Academic social networks metrics: an effective indicator for university performance?," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 127(3), pages 1381-1401, March.
    6. Sergio Copiello, 2019. "Research Interest: another undisclosed (and redundant) algorithm by ResearchGate," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 120(1), pages 351-360, July.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Sergio Copiello, 2019. "Research Interest: another undisclosed (and redundant) algorithm by ResearchGate," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 120(1), pages 351-360, July.
    2. Sergio Copiello & Pietro Bonifaci, 2018. "A few remarks on ResearchGate score and academic reputation," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 114(1), pages 301-306, January.
    3. Łukasz Wiechetek & Zbigniew Pastuszak, 2022. "Academic social networks metrics: an effective indicator for university performance?," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 127(3), pages 1381-1401, March.
    4. Sergio Copiello, 2020. "Other than detecting impact in advance, alternative metrics could act as early warning signs of retractions: tentative findings of a study into the papers retracted by PLoS ONE," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 125(3), pages 2449-2469, December.
    5. Lepori, Benedetto & Thelwall, Michael & Hoorani, Bareerah Hafeez, 2018. "Which US and European Higher Education Institutions are visible in ResearchGate and what affects their RG score?," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 12(3), pages 806-818.
    6. Vivek Kumar Singh & Satya Swarup Srichandan & Hiran H. Lathabai, 2022. "ResearchGate and Google Scholar: how much do they differ in publications, citations and different metrics and why?," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 127(3), pages 1515-1542, March.
    7. Yan, Weiwei & Zhang, Yin, 2018. "Research universities on the ResearchGate social networking site: An examination of institutional differences, research activity level, and social networks formed," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 12(1), pages 385-400.
    8. Shannon Mason & Yusuke Sakurai, 2021. "A ResearchGate-way to an international academic community?," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 126(2), pages 1149-1171, February.
    9. Martín-Martín, Alberto & Orduna-Malea, Enrique & Delgado López-Cózar, Emilio, 2018. "Author-level metrics in the new academic profile platforms: The online behaviour of the Bibliometrics community," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 12(2), pages 494-509.
    10. Weiwei Yan & Yin Zhang & Wendy Bromfield, 2018. "Analyzing the follower–followee ratio to determine user characteristics and institutional participation differences among research universities on ResearchGate," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 115(1), pages 299-316, April.
    11. Yang, Siluo & Zheng, Mengxue & Yu, Yonghao & Wolfram, Dietmar, 2021. "Are Altmetric.com scores effective for research impact evaluation in the social sciences and humanities?," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 15(1).
    12. Bhaskar Mukherjee & Siniša Subotić & Ajay Kumar Chaubey, 2018. "And now for something completely different: the congruence of the Altmetric Attention Score’s structure between different article groups," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 114(1), pages 253-275, January.
    13. Weiwei Yan & Xin Wen & Yin Zhang & Sonali Kudva & Qian Liu, 2023. "The dynamics of Q&A in academic social networking sites: insights from participants, interaction network, response time, and discipline differences," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 128(3), pages 1895-1922, March.
    14. Maria Cláudia Cabrini Grácio & Natalia Rodrigues Delbianco & Fábio Sampaio Rosas & Antonio Perianes-Rodríguez, 2023. "Co-follower metric on academic-social media ResearchGate: similarities between Derek de Solla Price Memorial Medal winners," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 128(10), pages 5545-5569, October.
    15. Ying Guo & Xiantao Xiao, 2022. "Author-level altmetrics for the evaluation of Chinese scholars," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 127(2), pages 973-990, February.
    16. Mike Thelwall, 2021. "Measuring Societal Impacts Of Research With Altmetrics? Common Problems And Mistakes," Journal of Economic Surveys, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 35(5), pages 1302-1314, December.
    17. Juliana E. Raffaghelli & Stefania Manca, 2019. "Is There a Social Life in Open Data? The Case of Open Data Practices in Educational Technology Research," Publications, MDPI, vol. 7(1), pages 1-17, January.
    18. Vincenzo Corvello & Maria Cristina Chimenti & Carlo Giglio & Saverino Verteramo, 2020. "An Investigation on the Use by Academic Researchers of Knowledge from Scientific Social Networking Sites," Sustainability, MDPI, vol. 12(22), pages 1-16, November.
    19. Enrique Orduna-Malea & Alberto Martín-Martín & Mike Thelwall & Emilio Delgado López-Cózar, 2017. "Do ResearchGate Scores create ghost academic reputations?," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 112(1), pages 443-460, July.
    20. Daniela De Filippo & Fernanda Morillo & Borja González-Albo, 2023. "Measuring the Impact and Influence of Scientific Activity in the Humanities and Social Sciences," Publications, MDPI, vol. 11(2), pages 1-17, June.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:spr:scient:v:119:y:2019:i:2:d:10.1007_s11192-019-03063-6. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Sonal Shukla or Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.springer.com .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.