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WHAT IS RESEARCHGATE?
ResearchGate.net is an academic profile and social networking site, and a popular hub on the web for sharing academic publications.
ResearchGate is a private company attempting to monetize academic publishing, and it does not vet whether it has a license to host a publication.
WHY USE IT?
Many researchers and scientists will post PDFs of their articles on ResearchGate, so it is a source of free scholarly articles. They are often indexed by Google Scholar.
HOW TO CITE FROM RESEARCHGATE
ResearchGate is not a publisher.
ResearchGate is not a journal.
It is simply an academic social network, and any articles on it should be cited using their own citation information, with no mention of ResearchGate.
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Of course ResearchGate claims not to be a publisher (since there are legal implications), but it facilitates publications by those who own the copyrights in articles, which mostly means the authors. But in some cases nowadays the journal publishers like Elsevier, Wiley and Taylor and Francis claim the copyright of articles that appear in the journals they own -- so it all gets a bit messy. Authors like using ResearchGate because it allows a much wider readership to read their "open access" articles which might otherwise be behind paywalls or available only in abbreviated form. As we have already pointed out on this blog, "open access" nowadays often means "restricted access" or "access open to those with affiliations to academic institutions that have financial arrangements in place with the publishers".
While reading articles does not require registration, people who wish to become site members need to have an email address at a recognized institution or to be manually confirmed as a published researcher in order to sign up for an account. Members of the site each have a user profile and can upload research output including papers, data, chapters, negative results, patents, research proposals, methods, presentations, and software source code. Users may also follow the activities of other users and engage in discussions with them. Users are also able to block interactions with other users. A study found that over half of the uploaded papers appear to infringe copyright, because the authors uploaded the publisher's version.
As of 2020, it has more than 17 million users, with its largest user-bases coming from Europe and North America. Most of ResearchGate's users are involved in medicine or biology, though it also has participants from engineering, computer science, agricultural sciences, and psychology, among others.
ResearchGate does not charge fees for putting content on the site and does not require peer review.
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As readers will know, I am a great fan of ResearchGate, and I have uploaded many (but not all) of my papers onto the site over the years. Some of these are old articles in journals that have never been properly digitised -- so this is the only place where the articles can be found, if you are not able to visit an old-fashioned library which holds bound volumes of the journals going back to the 1960s.
Publishing on the platform is a bit of a laborious process, involving the scanning of each article and conversion to PDF format prior to uploading to ResearchGate. But it's worth it, I reckon, since my ResearchGate reads now total over 30,000. (We know that approx 50% of readers just look at articles very briefly, while the other 50% might actually read them properly........)
The big advantages of ResearchGate, from an author's point of view, are:
1. Instant access for readers to fully formatted articles in exactly the same format as in conventional published journals.
2. Immediate publication of notable research results -- whereas articles may take up to a year to appear in a "conventional" journal.
3. The ability to publish "pre-publication" articles or "working papers" for scrutiny and comment by peers. Such articles may then be corrected or modified on the basis of feedback and comments, and submitted later to journals. This makes the peer review process quite democratic -- unlike the peer review process undertaken by journal editors, which is secretive and often biased, and which can be unreliable. As we know, many articles are published that should never have seen the light of day, and some that are quite worthy are rejected on the basis of biased and ill-informed reviews by anonymous peer reviewers.
4. Blogging activity and debate on the record, relating to published working papers -- in contrast to specialist journals that have no regular route for "comment' or "scrutiny" pieces written by those who are unconvinced!!
5. Researchers can bypass the increasingly complex and cumbersome "submission process" which has been put in place by the big journal publishers -- and which makes submissions from non-affiliated authors very difficult indeed.
6. ResearchGate is free -- whereas the big journals nowadays charge up to £3,000 in APCs (article publication charges). Affiliated authors can generally get these charges paid by their institutions -- but many of us do not have that luxury.
7. A suggested above, the peer review process is collapsing, as journal editors find it increasingly difficult to find qualified reviewers for submitted articles. So the idea that journal articles are somehow more reliable and respectable than Researchgate working papers (for example) no longer holds.
As some readers will know, there is a huge row going on at the moment in the medical field about the commercialisation of academic publishing, with the whole editorial board of one medical journal resigning en bloc because of the high article publication charges and excessive profits by the publishers. That comes on top of concerns about the corrupt "science" published over the years by the employees of agrichemical corporations and big pharma. I saw that in action more than 20 years ago when I scrutinised the research output of Monsanto, and was shocked by the corrupt rubbish that found its way into print even in austere journals like "Nature Biotechnology". See "The Monsanto Papers" by Carey Gillam and these articles:
Just as we might say that what you see on the telly in TV documentaries is not necessarily true, so can we say that what appears in a learned journal is not necessarily balanced, soundly researched or reliable.
See also:
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