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ResearchGate can connect you with content and researchers that you’ll find valuable to your own work.

ResearchGate is a social networking site connecting researchers throughout the world by allowing them to share publications, and information. This guide provides an introduction to ResearchGate and contains information about some of the most useful features to help researchers and professors creating a ResearchGate profile.  ​

ResearchGate  was started by two researchers Dr. Ijad Madisch and Dr. Sören Hofmayer, and computer scientist Horst Fickenscher.  ResearchGate today has more than 7 million members. 

Here's a quick tour of a ResearchGate profile

A ResearchGate profile is an overview of a researcher’s work: their publications, professional expertise, institutions, contributions, and all the questions they have answered on the website. Researchers can show their peers current projects. 

Here is an example of a ResearchGate Profile.

Researcher: Yuanchang Xie

Screenshot of Yuanchang Xie’s profile was taken on the 20th of July 2015.

Publication is one of the most useful features on ResearchGate: whether you are adding your research (Journal articles, conference papers,etc.), looking for research in your field, or downloading other researcher’s work.

Here is an example of ResearchGate publications.

Screenshot of Yuanchang Xie’s profile was taken on the 20th of July 2015

Ask research-related questions answered by other specialists. Share your knowledge, connect with researchers, and identify yourself as an expert in your field.

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Scholarly Publications: Creating and Maintaining a ResearchGate Profile

• Getting Started
• Editing your Profile
• Adding Publications

Adding full text to publications on ResearchGate

Academic journal copyright policies.

• Check which versions of a publication, if any, you may post on ResearchGate using the Posting Journal Articles Online guide .  Please only post the full-text of articles that have been published in journals that allow you to do so.

If you have questions you may find the following ResearchGate link helpful.

How to add research (researchgate.net)

If you are using a mobile device, you can also view a PDF version of this guide with screenshots .

In general, authors who publish articles in academic journals are required to sign a copyright transfer agreement, which grants the journal's publisher copyright for the article.  This limits whether the full text of an article can be posted on sites like ResearchGate (citations for any article may be posted anywhere, including RG).  

The guide below contains a chart with guidelines detailing whether articles from specific journals may be posted on ResearchGate.

• Scholarly Publications: Posting Journal Articles Online by Nicholas Cummins Last Updated May 20, 2021 84 views this year
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Understanding Academia.edu and ResearchGate

← go back to the impact challenge table of contents.

We’ll be honest – we thought long and hard about including this chapter and its activities in the OU Impact Challenge. Academia.edu and ResearchGate both seem attractive to scholars, but they also have their share of disadvantages and downsides.    Ultimately, we decided to include this information, because so many of you at OU have accounts on these two sites. A quick search turns up 3,849 OU-affiliated users on Academia.edu and 4,731 on ResearchGate! But instead of diving right into the “how tos,” we think it’s especially important to place these two sites into context and preface them with important considerations.

Consideration #1: You Are Not the Customer

Consideration #2: You Might Be Breaking the Law

Another consideration with these particular services is the legality of uploading your work there. Most publishers require authors to sign a publication agreement/copyright transfer prior to a manuscript being published which outlines what you can/cannot do with your own work in the future (we will cover this in Chapter 11 of the OU Impact Challenge). Uploading your work – especially a publisher’s pdf – to a site such as Academia.edu or ResearchGate may be a violation of the terms of the publishing agreement, whereas uploading it to an institutional repository may not be (or can be negotiated not to be). Several years ago, a major academic publisher actively went after Academia.edu, requiring them to take down all of the publisher’s content that had been illegally uploaded, much to the surprise and dismay of these authors. And Academia.edu is not the only target . Earlier this year ResearchGate was set to take down nearly 7 million articles or about 40% of their content.

Consideration #3: Understand the Privacy Implications

Finally, some of these sites’ tactics are troubling from the standpoint of privacy and intellectual freedom. Personally and professionally, many find it distressing that a private company, which doesn’t adhere to the same professional ethics as librarians and other scholars do, collects information about who is reading what. Academia.edu, in particular, then offers to share that information with you if you subscribe to their “premium service.” And while their analytics dashboard doesn’t reveal readers’ names, it may provide enough information for you to know exactly who read your work.    You may decide not to pay for Academia.edu’s premium service, but even so – what you view and download will still be tracked. This may not be troubling to you (the “I’m not doing anything wrong, so I don’t care” argument), but we think it sets a bad precedent. What about tracking researchers who study terrorism? Or whistleblowing? Or even climate change? How might people at these academic social media companies create profiles and make judgments about you based on what you are reading? And what will they do with the information they collect, especially if asked for it by government entities?    We’ve posted some additional reading and resources below. And we will continue to cover some of these topics in the future, since they are highly relevant to sharing scholarly work. If you’re still interested in Academia.edu and/or ResearchGate after reading these articles, we’ve gone ahead and included those activities further down below. We’ve purposefully kept these activities brief, at least for now.     

• A Social Networking Site is Not an Open Access Repository , by Katie Fortney and Justin Gonder
• I Have a Lot of Questions: RG, ELS, SN, STM, and CRS , by Lisa Janicke Hinchliffe
• Dear Scholars, Delete Your Account At Academia.Edu , by Sarah Bond
• Academia, Not Edu , by Kathleen Fitzpatrick
• Reading, Privacy, and Scholarly Networks , by Kathleen Fitzpatrick
• Upon Leaving Academia.edu , by G. Geltner
• Should You #DeleteAcademiaEdu , by Paolo Mangiafico
• Should This Be the Last Thing You Read on Academia.edu? , by Gary Hall (downloads as a .pdf)

Make Profiles on Academia.edu and ResearchGate

You know all those things you wish your CV was smart enough to do – embed your papers, automatically give you readership statistics, and so on? Academia.edu and ResearchGate are two academic social networks that allow you to do these things and then some.    They’re also places where your some of your colleagues are spending their time. Actively participating on one or both networks may give you an opportunity to have greater reach with other researchers. And getting your publications and presentations onto these sites legally will make it easier for others to encounter your work. They do this not only through the social network they help you build, but also by improving the search engine optimization (SEO) of your research, making you much more “Googleable.”    Both platforms allow you to do the following:     

• Create a profile that summarizes your research
• Upload your publications, so others can find them
• Find and follow other researchers, so you can receive automatic updates on their new publications
• Find and read others’ publications
• See platform-specific metrics that indicate the readership and reach you have on those sites

Let’s dig into the basics of setting up profiles and uploading your work on these sites.

Getting Started on Academia.edu

Fill Out Your Profile

Now it’s time to add your OU affiliation and interests to your profile. Adding an OU affiliation will add you to a subdomain of Academia.edu which will allow you to more easily find your colleagues. The site will try to guess your affiliation based on your email address or IP address; make any corrections needed and add your department information and title.    Then, add your research interests. These are also important; they’ll help others find you and your work.

Connect With Others

Now let’s connect with your colleagues who are already on Academia.edu. You can either connect your Facebook account or an email account to Academia.edu, which will search your contacts and suggest connections.    You now have an Academia.edu profile! You can continue to spruce it up by adding more publications, as well as adding a photo of yourself, other research interests and publications, and connecting your Academia profile to the other services we’ve covered like ORCiD , GoogleScholar , Twitter , and LinkedIn . See how this might be coming together?!?

Academia.edu Homework

Now that you have a profile, set aside half an hour to explore two uses of Academia.edu:     

• Exploring “research interests” in order to discover other researchers and publications; and
• Getting more of your most important publications online; and

Make a Profile on ResearchGate

Next, we’ll help you with the other major player in the scholarly social network space, ResearchGate. ResearchGate claims 15 million users, and it will help you connect with many researchers who aren’t on Academia.edu. It can also help you understand your readers through platform-specific metrics, and confirm your status as a helpful expert in your field with their “Q&A” feature.    Given ResearchGate’s similarity to Academia.edu, we won’t rehash the basics of setting up a profile and getting your publications online. Go ahead and sign up, set up your account (remember to add detailed affiliation information and a photo), and add a publication or two.    Got your basic profile up and running? Great! Let’s drill down into those three unique features of ResearchGate.

Find other researchers & publications

• Top co-authors

ResearchGate Score & Stats

Limitations

We’ve covered many of the limitations of Academia.edu and ResearchGate in the first section of this chapter. But there is yet another one. It has been pointed out that Academia.edu and ResearchGate are information silos – you put information and effort into the site, but you can’t easily extract and reuse it later. This is absolutely correct. That’s a big downside of these services and a great reason to make sure you’ve claimed your ORCiD in Chapter 1 .    One solution to this drawback (and the ones mentioned above) is to limit the amount of time you spend adding new content to your profiles on these sites, and instead use them as a kind of “landing page” that can simply help others find you and three or four of your most important publications. Even if you don’t have all your publications on either site, their social networking features may still be useful to make connections and increase readership for your most important work.

ResearchGate Homework

Content for the OU Impact Challenge has been derived from “ The 30-Day Impact Challenge ” by Stacy Konkiel © ImpactStory and used here under a CC BY 4.0 International License.

Covid–19 Library update

Important changes to our services. find out more, q. how do i reference articles and papers located on research gate.

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Answered By: Rebecca Eyres Last Updated: Dec 16, 2021     Views: 1140

Research Gate (RG) is an online academic networking platform, on which researchers and academics upload their research papers, articles, chapters and other types of publications. The version of the paper may be the published version, for example if it is open access. However, if it is not open access the RG version may not be the final published version. When this is the case often the RG version will be missing essential information you need for your reference. Because of this, it is important to check for the most up to date version and consult this version to ensure it includes the same information you are using in your work. If available, you will also have the required information to cite and reference it accurately. When trying to locate a more up to date/published version, first try using Library Search , entering the title of the paper into the search box. For papers on RG that are chapters you may need to search for the book title, rather than the chapter title. If you are unable to locate it on Library Search, try searching Google . This search will also retrieve the RG version so you will need to check the results to see if the paper is located on another website. Once located, you should have more detail of the type of source it is and be able to identify the reference type to follow in the MMU Harvard referencing guide .

If you are unable to locate the paper anywhere else and there are minimal details on a paper on Research Gate, for example, only Author, Year and Title, with no other details to identify the publication type (e.g. book, journal, conference or publisher details) the only option would be to reference it following the format for a Webpage . However, please note, without any publication details, it is difficult to assess the academic quality and rigor of the paper, and therefore whether you can rely on it as substantial evidence in your assessed work.

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