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.

Abstract

Institutional offices for the communication and dissemination of science are gaining in importance at Spanish universities, and their activities can contribute to increasing the visibility and reputation of researchers. The objective of this study is to analyze the relations between the institutional communication of research results to the public and the impact and academic visibility of scientific papers. For this purpose, science communication and dissemination undertaken through press releases on R+D+i results from the Science Culture and Innovation Unit (SCIU) at Universidad Carlos III de Madrid (UC3M) were selected as a case study. This SCIU was chosen because it has published yearly reports for more than a decade on the impact in the media of its press releases. Press dossiers of the last five years available (2014-2018) were examined, and a database was created of the citations received by texts published in scientific journals indexed in the Web of Science as well as their mentions on social networks through the company Altmetric.com. After that, this information was statistically analyzed. The main results show that the journal impact index is important for obtaining academic citations or appearing in Twitter conversations. However, the influence of the journal impact factor turns out to be lower when it comes to popularizing scientific publications in the media. Furthermore, the statistical evidence points to the fact that scientific publications disseminated through the SCIU receive proportionally more citations than research that has not been disseminated through the institutional channel.