ResearchGate Social Network: Opportunities and Challenges

ResearchGate, as one of the academic-social networks, has become a platform for scientific cooperation to promote scientific skills. A large number of researchers engage in sci-entific activities and share research results. This paper aims to study the ResearchGate related researches and examines its opportunities and challenges for the academic communities.

The present research is a narrative-review. The study population includes English-lan-guage articles indexed in reputable databases such as Scopus and Web of Science and articles re-trieved through Google Scholar published in reputable journals.

Activity in ResearchGate enhances citation indexes more than ever. According to some studies and due to the importance of citation in universities’ ranking, the use of the ResearchGate professional network can lead to improving the ranking of universities in international ranking systems. However, according to former studies, there are drawbacks to this network, and it is nec-essary for the scientific communities to use the benefits of this network consciously.

Familiarity with the opportunities and challenges of applying ResearchGate can pro-vide relevant information to authorities to make informed decisions about using this social net-work in academic communities. $EဧUDFWJournal of Medical Library and Information ScienceRecieved: 13 Oct 2020Accepted: 26 Dec 2020IntroductionVol. 2, 2021propriate opportunity for researchers’ scientific development and activities related to scientific communication (3,4). One of these social networks that are highly appreciated among the scientific community is the ResearchGate network. The ResearchGate social network was founded in 2008 by two vi-rologists, Ijad Madisch and Sören Hofmayer, and a computer scientist, with the goal of providing a set of tools for collab-oration, knowledge sharing, and networking and exploration among researchers. It is currently headquartered in Boston CrossMarkNarrative reviewdoi.org/10.22037/jmlis.v2i.32545This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.