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ResearchGate

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• Go to the publication’s ResearchGate page
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Publications  is one of the most useful features on ResearchGate: whether you are adding your research (Journal articles, conference papers, and more), looking for research in your field, or simply downloading other researcher’s work. This research guide contains some useful tips on about adding or editing publication on ResearchGate. 

Two Ways to Add Publications

1. To add your unpublished work to your profile: 

Step 1:  After you are logged in to ResearchGate, go to your profile  Step 2:  Click on Add unpublished work in the top right-hand corner  Step 3:  Upload the file and enter the title, authors, and a description of your research  Step 4:  Click on Add to profile.

Second way to add a publication:

 Step 1: Once you are logged in to  ResearchGate , go on the top-left corner, and click on publications

Step 2:  Click on Add your publications in the right-hand corner  Step 3:   Upload the file and enter the title, authors, and a description of your research  Step 4:  Click on Add to profile.

Category of research

• Journal Articles
• Conference Papers
• All other Research

Another way to add your journal articles to your profile is by searching it on the ResearchGate database:

Step 1: On your profile page, click on Add your publications in the top right-hand corner

Step 2:  Select Journal articles 

Step 3:  Select Author match to be shown any author profiles matching your name

Step 4:  Confirm authorship of your research by clicking Yes next to anything you authored

Step 5:  Click Save to add your publications to your profile.

You can also add your own journal articles if you can‘t find on the ResearchGate database:

Step 3: Enter the title of the journal article you want to add to your profile

Step 4: Upload a full-text version of your article (optional)

Step 5: Click Continue

Step 6: Enter applicable details such as the authors, journal name, and publication date

Step 7: Click Finish to add your article to your profile.

To add research you presented at a conference to your profile:

Step 1: On your profile, click on add your publications in the top right-hand corner

Step 2:  Select Conference papers in the box that appears

Step 3 : Click Select file to find and upload your research (optional)

Step 4:  Enter the title of your research and click Continue

Step 5:  Enter details such as the authors and the conference name and date

Step 6: Click Finish to add your research to your profile.

To add other types of research to your profile (book, thesis, chapter, and more):

Step 1: Go to your profile, and click on add your publications in the top right-hand corner

Step 2:  Select all other research in the box that appears

Step 3: Select the type of research you are adding 

Step 4: Click Select file to find and upload your research (optional)

Step 5:  Enter the title of your research and click Continue

Step 6:  Enter any applicable details about your research

Step 7: Click Finish to add your research to your profile.

• << Previous: ResearchGate Profile
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• Last Updated: Oct 31, 2022 1:50 PM
• URL: https://libguides.uml.edu/c.php?g=334810

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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.

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• Published: 10 October 2017

Publishers threaten to remove millions of papers from ResearchGate

• Richard Van Noorden  

Nature ( 2017 ) Cite this article

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Take-down notices “imminent” as lawsuit is filed alleging widespread copyright infringement.

Millions of articles might soon disappear from ResearchGate, the world’s largest scholarly social network. Last week, five publishers said they had formed a coalition that would start ordering ResearchGate to remove research articles from its site because they breach publishers' copyright. A spokesperson for the group said that up to 7 million papers could be affected, and that a first batch of take-down notices, for around 100,000 articles, would be sent out “imminently”. 

Meanwhile, coalition members Elsevier and the American Chemical Society have filed a lawsuit to try to prevent copyrighted material appearing on ResearchGate in future. The complaint, which has not been made public, was filed on 6 October in a regional court in Germany. (ResearchGate is based in Berlin). It makes a “symbolic request for damages” but its goal is to change the site’s behaviour, a spokesperson says.

ResearchGate may already have begun taking articles down, according to a 10 October statement by the coalition. The group said it had noticed that the site had removed "a significant number of copyrighted articles", although ResearchGate hadn't shared information about this with publishers. "At this point, not all violations have been addressed and ResearchGate will need to take additional steps to cease unauthorized distribution of research articles," the statement says.

The clash has been a long time coming. Researchers are increasingly posting paywalled research papers online, many of them on ResearchGate, a network often likened to Facebook for scientists. The site boasts more than 13 million members and has raised more than US$80 million in start-up funding from investors including Microsoft founder Bill Gates and the Wellcome Trust, the London-based biomedical-research funder.

Not only do academics upload articles to the site, but ResearchGate also scrapes material online and invites researchers to claim and upload these papers, says James Milne, a spokesperson for the five-publisher group, which calls itself the Coalition for Responsible Sharing. In February this year, information scientist Hamid Jamali at Charles Sturt University in Wagga Wagga, Australia, reported that he had examined 500 articles at random from ResearchGate, and found that 40% of them breached copyright 1 .

Access issues

In September, the International Association of Scientific, Technical, and Medical Publishers, a trade group based in Oxford, UK, sent a letter to ResearchGate suggesting that the network introduce an automated filtering system, through which uploaded articles would be shared publicly or privately depending on their copyright status. Publishers generally say that paywalled articles for which they own copyright can be shared only privately; scientists are allowed to upload preprints, and peer-reviewed but unedited manuscripts, online for general access.

“ResearchGate refused to engage with us on that,” says Milne. The Coalition for Responsible Sharing, which also includes publishers Wiley, Wolters Kluwer and Brill, says it is “now left with no other choice” but to issue take-down notices.

Litigation has been tried before: in 2013, Elsevier sent 3,000 notices under the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act to scholarly networks including Academia.edu, demanding that they take down papers that breached Elsevier’s copyright. Those notices were passed on to the networks’ academic users. But the new actions would be on a larger scale.

Terms and conditions

ResearchGate declined to comment on the coalition’s statement, but its terms of service ask users not to store information that infringes copyright. They also state that because the site neither previews nor automatically reviews information that users have stored on it, ResearchGate can’t know about — and isn’t liable for — any possible infringements. The site says it will quickly disable access to infringing material after being notified of a problem.

But repeatedly sending lots of take-down notices is not a long-term solution, Milne says — hence the lawsuit, which aims to clarify what responsibility ResearchGate has to prevent copyright breaches. Milne says Elsevier and the American Chemical Society are hoping that the German court will tell the social network that it has a duty to identify copyrighted material on its website, and remove it; that the site must check whether material it scrapes from the Internet is copyrighted before users are invited to ‘claim’ it and upload it; and that ResearchGate will also be told it cannot modify copyrighted material.

“The expectation is that ResearchGate will be told by the courts to cease certain behaviours. This could take months or years,” says Milne.

Not all publishers have stopped discussions with ResearchGate. On 9 October, the company posted a joint statement with Nature ’s publisher Springer Nature, saying that the two firms had been in “serious discussions for some time” about sharing journal articles online while protecting intellectual-property rights, and that they were “cautiously optimistic” that a solution could be found. ( Nature ’s news and comment team is editorially independent from its publisher.)

Change history

10 october 2017.

Updated to include details of a 10 October statement by the coalition of five publishers, which said that ResearchGate had begun removing from public view some copyrighted articles.

Jamali, H. R. Scientometrics 112 , 241-254 (2017).

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Is the academic social networking site ResearchGate still relevant?

A recent deal with the publisher mdpi is leading some users to delete their accounts, by dalmeet singh chawla, special to c&en, january 19, 2024 | a version of this story appeared in volume 102, issue 2.

• Gates Foundation mandates preprints
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Sorry, but I do not support @MDPIOpenAccess or its publishing model. I will no longer maintain an account on @ResearchGate . — Dan Sloan (@SloanEvoLab) November 20, 2023

Rubén Laplaza uses the academic social networking site ResearchGate to keep up with the scientific literature in his field. “For me, ResearchGate has, for years, been a useful tool,” says Laplaza, a computational chemist at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Lausanne (EPFL). It helps him manage the deluge of published papers—including preprints, which are posted online before being peer-reviewed.

Founded in 2008, ResearchGate has millions of global users, most of them researchers. The site’s early funders included Bill Gates, Goldman Sachs, and the Wellcome Trust. It launched as a social platform where academics could discuss papers, but it ended up not being widely used for that purpose.

Instead, researchers use ResearchGate to follow one another, receive automatic alerts when colleagues publish papers, and share their papers legally with other academics with a single click.

Related: Malaysia won’t pay for researchers to publish in certain journals

Recently, however, ResearchGate has faced challenges. Those include backlash from the academic community for a deal it made with the Swiss publisher Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute (MDPI). And ResearchGate has settled lawsuits in Germany and the US with the publishing giant Elsevier and the American Chemical Society, which publishes C&EN. Some scientists are questioning whether the site is still relevant to them.

Alerts from ResearchGate can be useful, according to Laplaza, as long as colleagues in the same field are using the platform and actively posting their papers on it. Other methods of tracking relevant literature include setting up alerts on Google Scholar profiles, following relevant publications and academics on social media, and attending conferences.

Did they make you that offer in a predatory scam email? — ⌬Nessa Carson (@SuperScienceGrl) November 19, 2023

At the same time, “we are also all spammed to death already with all sorts of invitations,” Laplaza says. “So it’s a matter of trying to balance sources of information that are valuable, especially if they can be curated through people, but at the same time trying to prevent the use of bandwidth for useless communications.”

Some researchers who have similar concerns say the agreement with MDPI has driven them to delete their ResearchGate accounts. As part of the deal, roughly 210,000 papers from 10 journals published by MDPI will have an enhanced presence on the platform.

“These journals benefit from increased brand visibility and prominence across the ResearchGate network,” Giulia Stefenelli, chair of MDPI’s scientific board, says in an email, noting that the participating 10 titles will have dedicated journal homepages on ResearchGate. “Furthermore, authors gain automatic addition of their articles to their ResearchGate publication records, offering insights into their work’s impact through readership and citation data,” she says.

What a disastrous liaison. I always thought Researchgate was reputable... — Tim Jennerjahn (@JennerjahnTim) November 18, 2023

Stefenelli says MDPI is paying ResearchGate an undisclosed sum each year for the journal homepages. ResearchGate did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

MDPI has grown rapidly in the past few years to become one of the largest scholarly publishers in the world. But its journals have come under scrutiny by the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the Norwegian Scientific Publication Register; both institutions allege lack of rigor in published papers. In 2018, editors at one MDPI journal resigned en masse , claiming that they felt pressured to publish mediocre papers.

Most MDPI papers are parts of special issues, which are collections of papers on a certain topic that are typically handled by guest editors. Many papers published in such issues are invited. But bibliographic analyses show that special issues have lower rejection rates and shorter processing times for articles. That’s what prompted the Swiss National Science Foundation to stop funding papers published in special issues starting in February 2024.

After the deal with MDPI was announced, academics expressed worries on social media that the agreement will only add to the flood of mediocre papers and pointless alerts. “As a frequent user of ResearchGate, I’m disappointed by your choice to prioritize MDPI journals over many society journals,” Çağatay Tavşanoğlu, an ecologist at Hacettepe University, wrote last year on X, formerly Twitter. “I, like many others, may soon delete my account unless this unwise decision is reconsidered.”

“This is so so so disappointing and sad!” Fengxiu Zhang, who studies climate action, disaster resilience, and technology in government at George Mason University, exclaimed on X. “This is a terrible, terrible idea,” Martin E. Andresen, an economist at the University of Oslo, commented on the platform. “Deleted my account.”

Fredrik Jutfelt, an animal physiologist at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, is also considering deleting this account. He recalls joining ResearchGate in its early days to easily share his research and discover other academics’ work—in part by keeping an eye on who’s citing his work. “It still has value,” he says. “I don’t see a good alternative.”

Laplaza, noting that there haven’t been many changes yet, is keeping his profile for now. “I just don’t want to be spammed,” he says. “If the price to pay to get a marginally useful notification about a paper that you may or may not care about is having to see or deal with a number of spam notifications, then maybe it’s just not worth it.” He says he will continue to use the site until the downsides outweigh the benefits.

I enjoy research gate but I am not sure this is a great move. Will there be way to block this enhanced presence of MDPI...not a fan. — Dave Boucher (@dave_boucher) November 18, 2023

Not sure I understand in the first place how it is in any way a good move for science to feature some journals over others, for money. And then you made it MDPI. Bye-bye ResearchGate. — Nanna Bjarnholt (@NBjarnholt) November 19, 2023

Lucie Büchi, a crop ecologist at the University of Greenwich, is also unhappy with the MDPI deal but is keeping her account. “It is still a very useful tool when you don’t have access to some journals because of paywalls,” she says. Büchi thinks ResearchGate will continue to exist and serve an important purpose.

Mark Austin Hanson, a molecular biologist and geneticist at the University of Exeter, says he thinks the concerns about the MDPI deal are overblown. The furor comes from a vocal minority on social media, he adds, noting that ResearchGate has also recently partnered with other publishers, including Springer Nature, Taylor & Francis, the American Institute of Physics, and Wiley.

Those deals ensure that final versions of open-access studies published in certain journals are available immediately on ResearchGate, thus boosting their visibility and readership. “I don’t think there’s any issue with it whatsoever,” Hanson says.

Jutfelt is not convinced. “We’ve looked at ResearchGate as an objective distributor of science and a platform where everyone is equal,” he says. “The main concern is publishers paying for visibility and paying for citations.”

He says his institution has discouraged its staff from publishing in some MDPI journals after they were added to Norway’s so-called level X . Researchers receive no government acknowledgment for publishing in journals on the list, which the Norwegian Scientific Index created in 2021 to highlight potentially predatory publications. What’s more, most MDPI journals don’t meet the criteria to be included in approved journal lists in Finland and Denmark.

Related: Online platform allows researchers to claim credit for grant peer review

In addition to negative responses to the MDPI agreement, ResearchGate has run into problems with other academic publishers. To settle copyright infringement lawsuits with Elsevier and ACS, ResearchGate adopted a technology that automatically checks if papers being uploaded to the site comply with publisher copyright.

“While you can see why [ResearchGate] is cozying up with publishers, this could work against them. They become less cool, social, innovative and a bit old-fashioned in an open world,” says David Nicholas, director of Ciber Research, a British firm that studies how people behave in digital environments. “Our research shows that [ResearchGate’s] success is waning among young researchers as they find other places to go,” like LinkedIn and WhatsApp, he adds.

Hanson plans to continue using ResearchGate, however. He argues that organizations like the Committee on Publication Ethics and databases like the Web of Science, Scopus, and the Directory of Open Access Journals should decide what constitutes legitimate science and whether or not that includes MDPI papers.

“ResearchGate is a social media site that hosts content others engage with,” Hanson says. “It’s not ResearchGate’s role to independently judge the value of the work itself, nor should it be.”

MDPI’s Stefenelli agrees. She points out that her firm advocates for evaluating journals through tools such as Think. Check. Submit. and databases including the Web of Science, Scopus, and the Directory of Open Access Journals. “As at December 2023, 26 Nobel laureates have contributed to more than 75 articles across 25 MDPI journals,” she says. “We encourage researchers to review our journals, editorial board, and published content to help further inform their opinions.”

Related: Chemistry preprints pick up steam

Dalmeet Singh Chawla is a freelance science journalist based in London.

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