One of the key aspects of any professional environment is communication with colleagues and exchange of opinions on various events and news from experts. ResearchGate is one of the most famous social networks for scientists, where they can contact their colleagues. The platform facilitates sharing information and experience.
ResearchGate was launched in 2008 to address the challenge of creating and disseminating scientific knowledge. The project aims to connect scientists and make research available to anybody interested. The community currently includes 25 million members from over 190 countries.
What are the opportunities the platform provides?
Networking: contact your colleagues, co-authors, and experts in your field.
Publication: add your works to the profile so that any user can consult them.
Access to papers: find the relevant articles in your field.
Answers to your questions: ask questions to experts.
Knowledge exchange: share your experience and knowledge by answering the questions from other users.
Citations: track statistics on your published papers and see who reads and quotes them.
Recent research: get updated on the relevant studies that match your profile.
Preprints: get feedback from other users before articles are actually published.
Who can join ResearchGate?
ResearchGate is a professional network where scientists and researchers can share and access scientific content, knowledge and expertise. Therefore, to register on the platform, you have to use your corporate email address in the @itmo.ru domain to confirm your status as a researcher. You can always change your email address after registration.
Even if you are not a scholar, you can use ResearchGate to find papers and ask questions as well as to submit your job applications without registration (please, refer to the corresponding sections "Publications", "Jobs", and "Questions") .
How to get your author’s profile registered
To reach out to researchers around the world and start collaborating, please, follow these five simple steps:
1. Refer to the platform. 2. Click "Join for free".
3. Choose your researcher type.
4. Enter your name, your corporate email address, and set a password.
5. To activate your account,click on the link in the email you receive.
Once your account is created, fill out your detailed profile on the platform. Here are some tips from the ResearchGate team:
Profiles with a photo receive on average 150% more views than those without one;
Describe your skills and experience so that other scholars could understand the area of your professional interests;
Add your affiliation, so that the resource can recommend you to your colleagues on ResearchGate;
For more information on editing your profile, refer to the Account settings;
For more information on finding and claiming your own scientific works, refer to the Authorship.
The copyright issue
ResearchGate is not a publisher and does not accept any articles for publication. Members can track and store their articles and preprints in open access if not restricted otherwise.
Please, note that ResearchGate collaborates with publishers. For example, in December 2023, the platform started a partnershipwith AIP Publishing. As a part of the agreement between AIP Publishing and ResearchGate, seven open access journals from the publisher became available on the scientific social network for researchers through the Journal Home application.
The collaboration ensures automatically adding scientific articles from journals to author profiles on the ResearchGate platform.
You can read more about the types of open access in our notes.
Other useful features
Keep yourself updated about new research;
Follow the researchers of interest to expand your network. To track the content refer to the Followingsection.
Recommend and share the content;
You can share a public recommendation of high-quality research to your colleagues on ResearchGate. Sharing the content is an option for personal communication.
Network with other researchers;
You can message in private to stay in touch with other scholars, update them on your work, share the content, and even find possible co-authors.
Invite colleagues to ResearchGate;
One way to ensure the visibility of your research in the scientific community is to invite co-authors and colleagues to join the platform.