Review of ResearchGate : Pros and cons and recommendations

About ResearchGate - Founded in 2008 by physicians Dr. Ijad Madisch and Dr. Sören Hofmayer, and computer scientist Horst Fickenscher  

ResearchGate is a networking site for researchers, particularly those engaged in broadly scientific research.

Let try whether it is worth using.  I did a little research and tested it myself https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Ahmad_Faizar_Jaafar

Pros
ResearchGate is free to join and currently has about 3 million users mainly in the sciences.  It offers the following benefits to researchers:

• Sharing publications
• Connecting with colleagues
• Seeking new collaborations
• Obtaining statistics and metrics on use of uploaded publications
• Asking questions of researchers around the world that have the same set of interests
• Job seeking or recruitment

ResearchGate incorporates many elements of familiar social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn:

• Creating profiles https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Ahmad_Faizar_Jaafar
• Liking and following researchers and their publications
• Endorsing the skills of others
• Ability to bookmark favourites
• Ability to comment or send feedback
• Ability to share news items and updates easily and quickly

ResearchGate links researchers around selected topics and specialisations – these can be chosen or edited at any time by members.  Members can track and follow the research publications of others in their field.

Members can upload copies of papers (either pre- or post-review) and the associated raw data.  All will be searchable.  Non-peer-reviewed material can be added only through manual file upload.

Researchers are encouraged not only to upload successful results but also those results from failed projects or experiments – the latter are stored in a separate but searchable area.

ResearchGate finds publications for members from a number of major databases, for example, PubMed, arXiv, IEEE, RePEC and CiteSeer enabling automatic creation of a publications list.  Lists can also be created or added to manually or importing from a reference management database such as EndNote.  


ResearchGate offers the ability to search and filter on a variety of topics: author, institution, journal, publication, and so on.
Members can request a copy of a paper from the author if it is not freely available.

Full text publications uploaded to ResearchGate are indexed by Google.
ResearchGate contains useful information about journals, such as impact factors, metrics and some details of open access policy – in this respect it is useful for bringing information together into one place.

Cons
ResearchGate claims to have 3 million users but it is not clear how many of these are active accounts that are maintained and updated regularly.

A high percentage of ResearchGate members are postgraduate and other students (may be a drawback for established researchers).

Some members have complained about unwanted email spamming.  To avoid receiving several emails a day, unwanted updates or followers, be sure to manage your Notifications and Privacy settings both of which can be accessed through Account Settings.

Many of the publications that are available through ResearchGate are actually uploaded illegally in terms of publisher open access policy.

Putting a copy of your paper on ResearchGate will not mean that you are compliant with funder policy.  On the contrary, you may be in breach of publisher policy. 


Recommendations
The more effort you put into maintaining and regularly updating your profile, the more you will get out of ResearchGate.


The extent to which ResearchGate will be useful to individual researchers depends on the researcher’s aims.  If the aim is to promote work then ResearchGate alone will probably not suffice.  Consider using ResearchGate in conjunction with other sites such as Academia.edu, Mendeley, Google Scholar or figshare.  Activity and membership varies from one site to another and from one discipline to another, so researchers will need to investigate for themselves in order to evaluate potential value.

https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Ahmad_Faizar_Jaafar

source  http://blogs.exeter.ac.uk/openresearchexeter/2013/11/06/74/