ResearchGate’s self-definition is a social networking site for scientists and researchers to share papers, ask and answer questions, and find collaborators (http://www.researchgate.net/). The interface is easy to use, and recommended by many users. The major feature of the ResearchGate is self-archiving (green open access). If you have questions regarding to the self archiving policy, please read our previous post at (http://thefutureenergy.org/?p=526). If the publisher doesn’t allow self-archiving, you can only send the published paper privately to the scholars who want to read it.
Another advantage that I liked is the self publishing function of ResearchGate. It allows you to publish any unpublished materials, and assigns a DOI to your document. The cost of generating DOI is on ResearchGate. I used this function to generate DOI for the corrected version of my paper, and students’ conference papers. The Google ranks of ResearchGate and TheFutureEnergy.org are much higher than the predatory publishers.
Compared with Google citation (http://thefutureenergy.org/?p=446), ResearchGate provides a similar citation counting function. The ResearchGate only covers SCI journals (i.e. journals have an impact factor.), while Google covers a broad range, resulting in a higher citation number.
Cons: Many scholars are too busy to maintain their own page, or don’t have a habit to use this website. Since Linkedin was established as a professional social network early, ResearchGate is more like a publications-sharing community.
Related readings:
http://blogs.exeter.ac.uk/openresearchexeter/2013/11/06/74/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ResearchGate
