This week was full of events for us here at ResearchGate HQ. Today Ijad and Matt Cohler, our awesome investor from Benchmark Capital, met with Klaus Wowereit, the mayor of Berlin. Fun times!

We spoke about why we opened up shop in the German capital and how Berlin can attract even more world-changing entrepreneurs and investors. Mayor Wowereit is enthusiastic about the startup scene and has a lot of ideas to keep it developing.

We’re sure that we made the right decision when we moved to Berlin, and we hope that others will follow suit!

Klaus Wowereit, Ijad Madisch and Matt Cohler. Credit: Laura Trumpp.

Here at ResearchGate HQ, we’ve been hard at work updating the RG Score.

What’s new?

We designed and built the RG Score to adapt to your needs. Our recently updated algorithm now takes a whole lot more data into account when considering the weight of your peer-reviewed publications. We think this update will provide you with an even more comprehensive way to build, measure, and leverage your scientific reputation.

How does it work?

Contributions: First it’s up to you to decide what to contribute to the research community. Whether it’s your questions and answers in Topics, a published paper you add to your profile, or the negative results and raw data you upload, anything you contribute can count towards your RG Score.

Interactions: Then it’s up to the community: not only does our algorithm look at how your peers receive and evaluate your contributions, it also looks at who these peers are. This means that the higher the scores of the researchers who interact with your work, the more your own score will increase. Your peer-reviewed research is then factored in to your score to reflect your current standing within the wider scientific community.

Reputation: With the RG Score, reputation is passed from researcher to researcher, allowing you to build and leverage your reputation based on all of your research, not just the work you’ve published.  

And there’s more to come. The RG Score is constantly evolving. Here’s what we’re working on next:

• You’ll soon be able to see how and where your publications have been cited.

• We’re working on ways to give you more options when it comes to evaluating your peers’ contributions.

• We’re adapting the RG Score to include a lot more discipline-specific data.

• We’re launching a new way for you to provide us with feedback. Expect to see this soon.

We’d like to thank you for all the feedback you’ve given us so far. Please keep your questions and comments coming.

Go to your RG Score

We’re in the middle of a wonderfully exciting week here at ResearchGate HQ. Today we happily announced the take-over of ScholarZ, a German professional network and knowledge management platform.

Daniel, CEO of ScholarZ, and Ijad, ourCEO and co-founder, are equally delighted about the news. “The take-over by ResearchGate is a fantastic new start, for us and for our users,” Daniel says. Ijad is thrilled that ScholarZ users are finding a new home on ResearchGate: “Scholarz.net users are a great addition to the ResearchGate community.”

Please welcome all ScholarZ members to ResearchGate along with us! On to even more adventures, innovations and discoveries!

Scholarz.net will discontinue its services in January.

Read more here...

Today’s a big day at ResearchGate HQ in Berlin. The Harvard Clubs of Germany awarded us an important German entrepreneurs’ prize: the “Deutscher Unternehmer Preis” 2012 in the category “Startup”.

We’re extremely excited to share this with you, our users, and of course the ResearchGate team. This prize encourages us to go forward and continue changing the world of science.

Thank you for being part of this incredible journey!

Here's Ijad receiving the award in Frankfurt last night.