Investigating the Scientific Activity of the Authors of Highly Cited Articles in the ResearchGate and its Impact on the Scientometric Indicators in the Google Scholar Citation Database(Case Study: iMetrics Field)

The main aim of this research is to study the scientific activity of the authors of highly-cited articles in the iMetrics field in the ResearcGate scientific social network and its impact on the scientometric indicators in the Google Scholar citation database. This study is a basic and applied research. The research community consists of the authors of the highly-cited articles in the field of iMetrics, indexed at the Scopus database in 2010-2019. In the first step of this research, all articles published in two core journals in the field of imetrics, namely Scientometrics and Journal of informetrics in the period under study are extracted from Scopus database.The extracted articles have been sorted in descending order based on the number of citations and the top 200 articles have been selected as the sample for review in terms of citation rate. The authors of these articles, who are members of the ResearchGate social network and also have profiles on Google Scholar, were then identified. Then, in the second step of the research, the relationship between the alternative metrics of the authors of the ResearchGate and the productivity indicators of these authors in the Google Scholar system was examined. The findings showed that due to the low correlation coefficient between the variables, there is not much relationship between the alternative measures of ResearchGate member authors and the H-index as well as the i10 index of the same authors in Google Scholar. In general, it can be said that although ResearchGate and other scientific social networks increase research communication and sharing of scientific products, this issue can be effective in the quantity of research outputs and increasing the visibility of scientific products, but to determine the actual usefulness of these media in practice , can be analyzed analytically by conducting separate researches in other thematic fields and on a wider scale.