researchgate journal articles

Scholarly Publications: Creating and Maintaining a ResearchGate Profile

• Getting Started
• Editing your Profile

Adding publications to your ResearchGate profile

Academic journal copyright policies.

• Adding Full Text

If you have questions you may find the following ResearchGate link helpful.

How to add research (researchgate.net)

If you are using a mobile device, you can also view a PDF version of this guide with screenshots .

In general, authors who publish articles in academic journals are required to sign a copyright transfer agreement, which grants the journal's publisher copyright for the article.  This limits whether the full text of an article can be posted on sites like ResearchGate (citations for any article may be posted anywhere, including RG).  

The guide below contains a chart with guidelines detailing whether articles from specific journals may be posted on ResearchGate.

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How do I edit my publication’s details?

• Go to the publication’s ResearchGate page
• Click Edit on the toolbar below your publication’s title and abstract
• Make the necessary changes
• Click Save changes.

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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 To add your unpublished work to your profile: 

Step 1:  After you are logged in to ResearchGate, go to your profile  Step 2:  Click on Add unpublished work in the top right-hand corner  Step 3:  Upload the file and enter the title, authors, and a description of your research  Step 4:  Click on Add to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

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ResearchGate

ResearchGate.  ResearchGate,  10115 Berlin, Germany;    http://www.researchgate.net ; free. 

Contemporary scholarly scientific research and publishing are characterized by a large number of journals, the fast tempo of publication, and the competitiveness of the funding process. These factors, in conjunction with the pervasive adoption of communication via social media platforms in academia, have given rise to a demand for new venues for scholars and scientists to collaborate on, publicize, share, and quantify the impact of their published works. Because medical librarians are an integral part of the research and scholarly communication process, the popularity of these new platforms calls for a basic familiarity with their features that an informed library professional can provide.

One example of a platform that has emerged in recent years in response to this demand is ResearchGate, a for-profit, social media–like scientific networking and collaboration website. The umbrella term “scholarly collaboration network” has been used to describe platforms like ResearchGate and its competitors.

ResearchGate was founded in Berlin in 2008 by two physicians and a computer scientist. Since its debut, the site has successfully attracted both large numbers of users as well as substantial private investment [ 1 ]. ResearchGate claims to have reached the 15 million member mark in 2017 [ 2 ].

ResearchGate’s primary feature is the individual researcher profile, which is used to promote scholarly production. The site creates profiles with information harvested from literature databases and other sources, while permitting researchers to create profiles by registering on the site. Standard elements of a profile include a dashboard-like overview, citations to published work, contact and career information, research interests, links to citations of potential interest, and selected impact metrics. Profiles can be augmented by including contact information, a photograph, citations to work that has not been discovered by ResearchGate, and full-text article content for sharing with other members. Site members can follow other researchers and their work, identify colleagues and coworkers such as lab personnel, and share details of current projects.

One distinctive feature is a question submission-and-response knowledgebase, allowing members to pose, respond to, and track questions regarding research and other topics of interest. There is also a proprietary quantitative altmetric called RG score. This score is based on work appearing in the researcher profile and other ResearchGate members’ interactions with it. The RG score has attracted criticism aimed at a lack of transparency in how it is calculated and at vulnerabilities leading to the potential of intentional inflation by those seeking to abuse it [ 3 ].

Revenue streams for the website include advertising that appears on its question-and-answer database page, job recruitment listings, and conference announcements. These displays are customized for individual users.

One characteristic ResearchGate shares with social media platforms is vigorous user engagement activity. The site frequently generates emails encouraging members to log in to monitor how many new views their profiles have garnered, how many members are following their research, and other metrics of engagement. While such notification messages can be managed in member account settings, these persistent enticements to spend time on the site mimic aspects of social media and are drawing increasing amounts of criticism. As with other social media platforms, the potential for misuse and malicious exposure of the accumulated user data are also concerns.

The high visibility that ResearchGate has achieved has not come without controversy. During the platform’s rise to prominence, one factor in its popularity was the large volume of full-text portable document format (PDF) articles present in many researcher profiles. These full-text PDFs were easily discoverable in web searches, making ResearchGate a popular source for article sharing.

Relevant to note is that a sizeable percentage of the articles that were available on ResearchGate were versions of PDFs that were protected by copyright law and not permitted to be shared. This fact came to the attention of a number of publishers and resulted in a coordinated effort on their part to address this issue.

In 2017, a group of publishers, including such large firms as ACS Publications and Elsevier, formed an organization called the Coalition for Responsible Sharing to pressure ResearchGate to take measures against distributing copyright-protected material on its platform. The coalition advocated for adherence to the International Association of Scientific, Technical and Medical (STM) Publishers’ “Voluntary Principles for Article Sharing on Scholarly Collaborations Networks,” a document outlining parameters for approved sharing among researchers [ 4 ].

ResearchGate responded to this pressure by removing some copyright-protected content, but at the time of this writing, the issue had not been completely resolved. Several large publishers, including SpringerNature, have recently announced an agreement to explore ways to allow their content to be shared legally on ResearchGate [ 5 ]. ACS and Elsevier are pursuing the matter in a US federal court [ 6 ].

ResearchGate’s success in building a large user base gives it the potential to survive the substantial legal challenges it faces. While the platform’s scale and attractive user interface may appeal to many researchers, issues such as a lack of transparency in the composition of the RG score, concerns regarding use of member data, and an attitude of ambivalence toward the complicated topic of article sharing contribute to a strong case that ResearchGate is not the optimal solution to the pressing need for a space for scholars and scientists to freely collaborate and communicate regarding their work.

Copyright compliance and infringement in ResearchGate full-text journal articles

• Published: 16 February 2017
• Volume 112 , pages 241–254, ( 2017 )

Cite this article

• Hamid R. Jamali   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0003-1232-6473 1  

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ResearchGate is increasingly used by scholars to upload the full-text of their articles and make them freely available for everyone. This study aims to investigate the extent to which ResearchGate members as authors of journal articles comply with publishers’ copyright policies when they self-archive full-text of their articles on ResearchGate. A random sample of 500 English journal articles available as full-text on ResearchGate were investigated. 108 articles (21.6%) were open access (OA) published in OA journals or hybrid journals. Of the remaining 392 articles, 61 (15.6%) were preprint, 24 (6.1%) were post-print and 307 (78.3%) were published (publisher) PDF. The key finding was that 201 (51.3%) out of 392 non-OA articles infringed the copyright and were non-compliant with publishers’ policy. While 88.3% of journals allowed some form of self-archiving (SHERPA/RoMEO green, blue or yellow journals), the majority of non-compliant cases (97.5%) occurred when authors self-archived publishers’ PDF files (final published version). This indicates that authors infringe copyright most of the time not because they are not allowed to self-archive, but because they use the wrong version, which might imply their lack of understanding of copyright policies and/or complexity and diversity of policies.

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Acknowledgement

The author would like to thank Mr. M. Sangari for his help in part of the data collection.

The study was partially funded by Kharazmi University (Iran).

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Hamid R. Jamali

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Jamali, H.R. Copyright compliance and infringement in ResearchGate full-text journal articles. Scientometrics 112 , 241–254 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-017-2291-4

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Received : 14 November 2016

Published : 16 February 2017

Issue Date : July 2017

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-017-2291-4

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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.