ResearchGate, Google Scholar, and other academic/research networks

[futureapppsy2]

What do you all think of these?

Personally, I love Google Scholar profiles and wish everyone had them, as they provide a quick way to look at someone's profile and see their "true" publications. This is especially helpful if people have published under multiple names or if they have a really common name. There's someone else, totally unrelated to me, who publishes research that is somewhat similar to mine topically and has the same first and last name. I like that I can distinguish what publications are and aren't mine easily. Also, the automatic citation, H index, and i10 index counts are nice; I have noticed some errors in terms of citations but only a couple and in both directions, so it seems pretty accurate on the whole.

I'm on ResearchGate and get a decent number of full text requests, but I don't really get it beyond being a publication listing and repository and a way to see when friends, colleagues, and related researchers have published new things. The Q&A feature doesn't seem that useful, and I have no idea how RG Scores actually work, other than the fact that IF seems to play a role.

Any thoughts on these or other academic/professional social networking sites?

---

Members don't see this ad.

 

[WisNeuro]

I do Google Scholar. It's easy enough for those of us who are primarily clinicians and only publish here and there. I like it, and it provides a good platform for tracking who has cited what.

 

[Therapist4Chnge]

We were strongly encourged/required to join RG. The "Q/A" topics can be interesting (based on topics of interest), though usually not super relevant. It seems to have a good % of international and basic science scholars, which has been interesting. I need to add/confirm my publications on it, I figured I'd see if colleagues added them and would save me the trouble. I'm not on Google Scholar, but I guess I should check it out.

 

[futureapppsy2]

We were strongly encourged/required to join RG. The "Q/A" topics can be interesting (based on topics of interest), though usually not super relevant. It seems to have a good % of international and basic science scholars, which has been interesting. I need to add/confirm my publications on it, I figured I'd see if colleagues added them and would save me the trouble. I'm not on Google Scholar, but I guess I should check it out.

Google scholar is great because the automatically flag your publications for you, including when they come out onlinefirst and when they move from onlinefirst to in print.

 

[Ollie123]

Google scholar is great, especially now that universities are doing a better job providing full-text access linked through it (one of its major flaws early on). The profiles work well. In my experience, research gate seems to function primarily as a means for pay-to-publish scam journals to track me down and for folks without institutional affiliations (or in low-income countries or institutions too cheap to pay for library subscriptions) to get full-text access. I support this in principle, but frankly don't want to spend time maintaining it, particularly given all the nuances to figuring out when its actually allowable to post articles. Plus, I find their interface clumsy, inefficient and just generally unpleasant to work with relative to google scholar. If/when I reach a point in my career I have administrative staff who can maintain it for me, I might reconsider but as of right now it doesn't seem worth keeping up.

I'll probably be keeping both relatively private until I'm relatively settled on the job market though. While I have a good number of publications for someone just finishing internship and they are generally in strong journals, my citation count is rather miserable so its not something I want to make easily accessible right now.

Note that this is all coming from someone who despite a love of gadgets and technology, generally loathes social media in most forms and relies on his spouse to maintain some form of presence on facebook so people know I didn't die or disappear. So understand my opinions may be somewhat colored by the fact that I am a crotchety 80-year-old at heart.

 

[xXIDaShizIXx]

I really liked Google Scholar when I was at MW because they had terrible library resources when I wanted information.

 

[futureapppsy2]

Google scholar is great, especially now that universities are doing a better job providing full-text access linked through it (one of its major flaws early on). The profiles work well. In my experience, research gate seems to function primarily as a means for pay-to-publish scam journals to track me down and for folks without institutional affiliations (or in low-income countries or institutions too cheap to pay for library subscriptions) to get full-text access. I support this in principle, but frankly don't want to spend time maintaining it, particularly given all the nuances to figuring out when its actually allowable to post articles. Plus, I find their interface clumsy, inefficient and just generally unpleasant to work with relative to google scholar. If/when I reach a point in my career I have administrative staff who can maintain it for me, I might reconsider but as of right now it doesn't seem worth keeping up.

I'll probably be keeping both relatively private until I'm relatively settled on the job market though. While I have a good number of publications for someone just finishing internship and they are generally in strong journals, my citation count is rather miserable so its not something I want to make easily accessible right now.

Note that this is all coming from someone who despite a love of gadgets and technology, generally loathes social media in most forms and relies on his spouse to maintain some form of presence on facebook so people know I didn't die or disappear. So understand my opinions may be somewhat colored by the fact that I am a crotchety 80-year-old at heart.

I'm surprised that you would link RG to academic spam--I got a lot of that once I started publishing first author stuff and just assumed that my contact info was being combed from databases and journals. My RG profile doesn't have my email attached, and I haven't noticed any increase in spam since I started one. I do think RG itself can be a tad on the spam side, but it's moderate enough not to annoy me that much. I don't post any full texts directly on RG, although I'll send them to people privately if they request them.

I wouldn't worry about a low citation count at this point--I think/hope search committees know that it takes a while fir stuff to get out then read then cited, so I don't think anyone will expect high citation count straight out of grad school. With what I know of your (excellent) publication record, I wouldn't worry at all, tbh.

 

[Pragma]

Google scholar is the only one I hear people talk about. I get tons of RG spam and I am not even a member

 

[cara susanna]

I like Google Scholar. RG perplexes me, especially how they calculate the RG score.

 

[futureapppsy2]

I like Google Scholar. RG perplexes me, especially how they calculate the RG score.

Me, too--I wish they would release their algorithm!

 

[AcronymAllergy]

I'm on both, but more consistently use Google Scholar--although for article searches; I don't really use either one to find information on authors. GS does seem to be a bit more straightforward in user-friendly in terms of getting the profile setup and what not, but I honestly haven't yet checked out that portion enough to form a strong/informed opinion.

The option to "follow" folks on RG seems interesting, particularly as they'll recommend folks doing work in similar areas. Does GS offer something similar (I already make use of their daily topic-related email digests)?

 

[deleted343839]

I like Google Scholar. It's pretty good at alerting me to new articles in my field, and the author profiles (when they exist) are straightforward and helpful. I'm on RG too but I find the interface clunky.

 

[futureapppsy2]

I'm on both, but more consistently use Google Scholar--although for article searches; I don't really use either one to find information on authors. GS does seem to be a bit more straightforward in user-friendly in terms of getting the profile setup and what not, but I honestly haven't yet checked out that portion enough to form a strong/informed opinion.

The option to "follow" folks on RG seems interesting, particularly as they'll recommend folks doing work in similar areas. Does GS offer something similar (I already make use of their daily topic-related email digests)?

Google scholar recommends me articles based on what I've published, and the suggestions are usually really relevant, IME.

 

[deadmau5]

I have both but prefer Google Scholar. The one thing about research gate is you can link the pdf pretty easily.

 

[Ollie123]

I'm surprised that you would link RG to academic spam--I got a lot of that once I started publishing first author stuff and just assumed that my contact info was being combed from databases and journals.

Just a suspicion. I noticed a close temporal proximity between article requests and inflation of spam, but it could be coincidental. I'm also just hard-pressed to think of why a botanist in India would all of a sudden want the full-text of every article I've ever written (had things like this happen a couple times).

 

[AcronymAllergy]

Just a suspicion. I noticed a close temporal proximity between article requests and inflation of spam, but it could be coincidental. I'm also just hard-pressed to think of why a botanist in India would all of a sudden want the full-text of every article I've ever written (had things like this happen a couple times).

Hmm, I wonder if this is perhaps the source of all the odd/random conference attendance requests I've been receiving over the past year or so. Same goes for the spam emails about purchasing protein assays and the like.

 

[futureapppsy2]

Hmm, I wonder if this is perhaps the source of all the odd/random conference attendance requests I've been receiving over the past year or so. Same goes for the spam emails about purchasing protein assays and the like.

Nah, I don't think so. I got those long before I ever had a RG profile--pretty much as soon as I published a first author article (i.e., was the contact author on the journal webpage) and especially when I published something first author in a medical journal. Thankfully, my Gmail mostly recognizes them as spam now. 🙂

@Ollie123, that's interesting, as all of my RG full text requests have been legitimate (researchers in my area or IRL friends in other areas) and have occasionally even started a dialogue about their work, in the context of why they wanted the article. YMMV, though. Like I said, I'm not necessarily RG's biggest fan and much prefer GS, but it does seem to have some limited utility in terms of networking and promoting articles to interested parties.

 

[Justanothergrad]

I generally like RG just because of the ability to read through some of the Q/As. They aren't always good and; sometimes its people trying to get answers to homework, but I've also found a few people that I follow based on their very insightful responses, often including references. I don't get on it much, but its easy to create an account. Although yes, I do have a lot of random folks in other fields follow me. They haven't asked for fulltexts though. Because of some of my articles, a gentleman in ...somewhere I don't remember.. is emailing me about legitimate study design discussions/advice. I think it has promise.

Otherwise, Google scholar is fantastic but doesn't allow that sort of easy networking.