Which US and European Higher Education Institutions are visible in ResearchGate and what affects their RG score?

Benedetto Lepori, Michael Thelwall and Bareerah Hafeez Hoorani

Journal of Informetrics, 2018, vol. 12, issue 3, 806-818

Abstract: While ResearchGate has become the most popular academic social networking site in terms of regular users, not all institutions have joined and the scores it assigns to academics and institutions are controversial. This paper assesses the presence in ResearchGate of higher education institutions in Europe and the US in 2017, and the extent to which institutional ResearchGate Scores reflect institutional academic impact. Most of the 2258 European and 4355 US higher educational institutions included in the sample had an institutional ResearchGate profile, with near universal coverage for PhD-awarding institutions found in the Web of Science (WoS). For non-PhD awarding institutions that did not publish, size (number of staff members) was most associated with presence in ResearchGate. For PhD-awarding institutions in WoS, presence in RG was strongly related to the number of WoS publications. In conclusion, a) institutional RG scores reflect research volume more than visibility and b) this indicator is highly correlated to the number of WoS publications. Hence, the value of RG Scores for institutional comparisons is limited.

Keywords: ResearchGate score; Institutional profiles; Higher education institutions; Altmetrics (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1751157718301068
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:infome:v:12:y:2018:i:3:p:806-818

DOI: 10.1016/j.joi.2018.07.001

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Informetrics is currently edited by Leo Egghe

More articles in Journal of Informetrics from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().