ResearchGate

What is ResearchGate?

ResearchGate is a European commercial social networking site for scientists and researchers to share papers, ask and answer questions, and find collaborators. Unlike the traditional networks, members can only join ResearchGate if they have an email address from a recognised institution or are manually confirmed as a published researcher. Content sharing on ResearchGate is focused on sharing published and unpublished research articles, presentations, conference papers, outputs and data. One of the useful features of ResearchGate is the ability to ask and answer questions of other users.

ResearchGate publishes an author-level metric in the form of research interest. This is calculated by an aggregate measure of reading, full-text reads, recommendations and citations.

When using ResearchGate, take care to only upload content you have a right to share. See our copyright articles for more information.

Key stats

According to ResearchGate, there are over 17 million users.

How can it be used for scholarly communication?

As this website is focused on scientific and scholarly networking, it is a great place to share your research with a professional audience. While this network is not suitable for public communication, it is a great way to increase scholarly engagement with your work. As ResearchGate facilitates communication between researchers, it is a great place to make initial contact with others – or to be contacted. If you have peer-reviewed scholarly articles you will find this is an excellent space to share your work.

Getting started

You can create a ResearchGate account for free and then take a look at the getting started guide.

There are a number of related links beneath this article under the see also heading.