The impact of ResearchGate indicators on increasing citation counts of top Clinical Medicine articles in Web of Science: A Comparative study of Iranian and Turkish Researchers

The purpose of the present research is a comparative study of the impact of ResearchGate indicators on increasing citation counts of top Clinical Medicine articles of Iranian and Turkish Researchers in the Essential Science Indicators database of WOS.
This is an applied research and has been conducted using scientometric methods. Article title, the number of citation counts, publishing year and Author of "Hot papers" and "Highly Cited papers" (Top articles) of Iranian (60) and Turkish (202) researchers was extracted from ESI. Then the number of readership and citation counts of articles was extracted from ResearchGate. Data were analyzed by descriptive and analytical statistics test using Microsoft Excel and SPSS16.
Findings: Spearman correlation test results showed that the number of citation counts in ESI have a significant positive correlation with the number of citation counts in Researchgate. However this statistical test also showed there isn’t significant positive correlation between the number of ResearchGate Readership counts and the ESI number of citation counts.
Self-archiving in scientific social networking sites such as ResearchGate may have effect on visibility of the articles which may also affect their received citations