ResearchGate as a source for scientific evaluation: revealing its bibliometric applications

Abstract

ResearchGate is currently one of the most important academic social networks, with more than 9 million users and 80 million documents. The platform offers not only important academic networking tools and job vacancies but also a wide range of bibliometric indicators. The objective of this work is to discuss the main advantages and disadvantages of these indicators paying special attention to the RG Score, the ResearchGate´s flagship indicator. Although ResearchGate provides features and bibliometric indicators of enormous potential in order to gather additional insights about the scientific and academic impact of authors´ production, their communication policies and some recent actions taken in the design, development, and dissemination of indicators generate serious doubts regarding their use for evaluation purposes. Finally, regarding the RG Score indicator, we conclude that it does not measure the prestige of researchers, but instead their level of participation in the platform.