RG Score compared with H-Index: An Altmetrics study

Research social networks having capacities such as communication and dissemination, have drawn the attention of researchers. It seems that new means are required to assess studies published on this medium.
Research This research, using the Altmetrics method, investigates the compatibility of RG score with citation indexes. To collect data, the names of all faculty members of the University of Tehran’s College of Engineering were searched in ResearchGate. It revealed that 231 of them are members of ResearchGate and have RG score. Next, the members’ h-index was searched in the Web of Science, Scopus and GoogleScholar to assess the alignment between the RG score with these three indexes. Spearman’s rank correlation coefficient test was used for the assessment.
Findings: According to the research findings, the correlation between the h-index taken from Web of Science and the RG score is 0.844, while the correlation between the h-index taken from Scopus and the RG score is 0.859 and the correlation between the h-index taken from GoogleScholar and the RG score is 0.820.
Hence, there is a meaningful statistical correlation between RG score and h-index. The highest correlation is seen between the h-index taken from Scopus and RG score. Therefore, RG score can be used as a complementary criterion for assessing researchers’ scientific activities.