Happy birthday to us!

Today, ResearchGate celebrates its fourth year of existence. And we couldn't be happier!

To mark the occasion, we ventured out into the bright and sunny Berlin afternoon and each set a balloon soaring up into the sky! 

Check out our little video to see the whole thing in action. 

And to prove just how far we've come, here's a vintage screenshot: ResearchGate's very first home page. 



Thank you to all our members, and to everyone who's been a part of this incredible journey. 

Here's to many more years of progress and innovation!

We’ve revamped, reworked and redesigned our profile to give you a better way to promote your work, skills and contributions.

Here’s a little of what you can expect from our update:

About Me: You can now let people know what you’re working on easily and efficiently. Use the new about me box to introduce yourself and your current project to the network.



Activity page: We’ve created a page for all your activity on ResearchGate, making it much easier for your followers to access your contributions and stay current with what you’re working on and interacting with.

In-line editing: Keep your profile up to date effortlessly. We’ve removed the ‘Edit profile’ page and introduced in-line editing, meaning you can now update everything directly from your profile.

Impact points: In an effort to make the way we calculate your impact points more transparent, we’ve broken them down by publication, giving you an overall number too.

Research skills: We’ve changed the way research skills function by turning them into taggable keywords. We suggest checking this field in your new profile to ensure we’ve transcribed your skills correctly. We have big plans for research skills, so watch this space.

Topics: We want your contributions on ResearchGate to be visible - you’ll notice a badge on your profile if you’re the curator or founder of a topic.

Privacy settings: We’ve streamlined and simplified our privacy settings - it’s now much easier to understand and control who sees what.

Over the coming weeks we’ll be fixing all kinds of niggly little issues - if you have any feedback for us, whether compliment or complaint, we’d love to hear from you. 

And believe it or not, this is just the beginning! We’ll be adding more exciting updates and features to profiles on ResearchGate very soon.

Don't forget, you can also find us on Twitter and Facebook.

We want you to be able to organise and display your academic output in the most efficient way possible, which is why we’ve been hard at work upgrading our publication infrastructure over the past few months.

Today, we’re thrilled to announce several improvements and a couple of brand new features for Publications.

Document viewer: We’ve built a nifty little document viewer that lets researchers read your publication directly from its detail page. This works with PDF files at the moment, but we’ll be expanding the types of files we support very soon.

Uploading supplementary data: Whether it’s raw data, a table of results or an image, you can now upload additional resources to your publications.

More detail for manually added publications: When manually adding publications, journal articles or conference proceedings, you’ll have the ability to include abstracts, keywords and much more. Additionally, each publication you add will get its own detail page, meaning that you’ll easily be able to share your work via a unique link. Other researchers can now also interact with your manually added work via by commenting on or rating it, in the same way they can with publications that have been added from our database.

More full-texts: We’ve now made more than 10 million full-texts accessible to you, all of which you can preview on ResearchGate. We’ll also provide you with a link to the publication source. If we’ve found a full-text you requested, we’ll send you an email to let you know.

Optimised database: We’ve optimised the way our database functions, meaning that everyone’s publication lists will be more accurate and up-to-date. Hassle free.

We hope you like what we’ve done as much as we do!

As always, we welcome all feedback - whether good, bad or ugly, so please send it our way.  

And, if you spot something that shouldn’t be there, just let us know. You can reach us via email or Twitter.

Yesterday was a big day for all of us at ResearchGate HQ. We were very pleased to be able to announce the completion of our series B investment round, led by Luke Nosek of the prestigious Founders Fund.

The investment will allow us to continue to grow as a company and as a network while pursuing new innovations. We have big plans for the site and science as a whole. And we can’t wait to share them all with you.

Thank you for being part of ResearchGate: your continued support and feedback have been invaluable.

Let’s change science together,

The ResearchGate Team

You can find more information on the announcement here:

Press Release
GigaOm
VentureBeat
Financial Times

From the people and topics to the conferences and publications you follow, we want to make it easy for to keep up-to-date with everything related to your field. So to ensure that you never miss out on any updates from your network, we’ve been working hard to optimise the way our live feed functions. Needless to say, we’re very excited about the results...



Here are just a couple of the improvements you can expect:

• Continuous scrolling: gone are the days of the ‘Next’ button. To load more updates from your network, just keep scrolling.
• ‘Show recent activity’: the refresh button is over - we’ll let you know when new contributions have been posted.
• Faster: we’ve updated our servers, so everything in your feed will now load much faster. 
• Display past activity: whether past or present your feed will now immediately be populated with activity. 
• Improved clustering: we’re still working on this one, but you should notice that your network activity is now clustered more efficiently.
• Better notifications: your drop-down notifications are now much more specific so you should easily be able to tell what exactly your contacts are commenting on and where. 

And the best part is that this is just the beginning: you can expect lots more updates and improvements from us in the coming weeks - so please keep sending us your feedback.

Of course we’re still working on ironing out all kinds of kinks and glitches - if you spot something that you think shouldn’t be there, please do drop us a line.

We bring you another topics update - you can now attach publications, links, images or files to your comments.

Just write your reply and add the appropriate media to support your comment.

Enjoy! And please keep your feedback coming, we take your comments and suggestions seriously. 

You can now browse by discipline to find the topics that interest you - just click on ‘Browse topics by discipline’ on your topics overview page.

If you’re looking for something more specific, you can also filter by sub-discipline.

Click on any topic to see its top, latest, new and total discussions, as well as its number of followers. 

Please keep sending us your comments and suggestions - we very much appreciate your feedback. 

Bastian Hofmann, one of ResearchGate’s very own software engineers, will be sharing his technical know-how at two upcoming developer conferences:

PHP Conference 2011 - at Rheingoldhalle - Mainz on the 10th and 11th of October. 

Web Dev Con - at the Intercontinental - Hamburg on the 17th and 18th of October. 

As an advocate of cross-platform web development, Bastian is committed to raising awareness of OpenSocial. In addition to his work at ResearchGate, Bastian is a committer and PMC member at the Apache Shindig Poject and a participant in the OpenSocial Foundation. 

A frequent speaker at conferences throughout the world, Bastian recently presented at the world-renowned open source convention OsCon in Portland, Oregon, where he covered advanced techniques for modern web applications using JavaScript. Bastian’s upcoming presentation will focus on OpenSocial, JavaScript mashups, Oauth, OpenID and other online identity management solutions.

We’ve made it a whole lot easier to contribute to topics.

You can now post directly to any topic you’re following from your topics overview page. So the next time you want to ask a question or share something, just choose which topic you want to contribute to from the drop-down menu.

We base our updates on your feedback, so please keep sending us your comments and suggestions.

As part of our effort to continue improving Topics, we’ve now made it possible for you to follow specific discussions.

We’ve made some changes to Topics based on your feedback.

You can now search through a topic to find the discussions you’re looking for. Just enter your keywords into the search bar to the right of the topic page - it’s that simple.

Please keep your suggestions coming, we love hearing from you.

Since the launch of ResearchGate, you’ve been using ‘Groups’ to get answers to a lot of complicated questions. Knowing how valuable this resource has become, we decided that it was time to build on it. The result is ‘Topics’ - a more community-driven way to discuss your work - and we think you’re going to like it.

How does Topics work?

1) Follow topics that match your research interests
And see useful articles, publications, links and other content contributed by your peers.

2) Ask a question
To discuss your work with those in the know.

3) Share something
And let other researchers in on what’s informing your work.

4) Rate posts according to quality
To make sure that the most helpful contributions are seen first.

Some extra information:

• If you’re a member of a public group, we’ll make sure you’re following the corresponding topic. But don’t stop there, you can follow as many as you want.
• Private and Secure Groups will become ‘Workgroups’, so you’ll be able to continue working with your colleagues in an exclusive environment, just as before.
• You can use the main search bar to find topics and discussions, but don’t hesitate to ‘Create a Topic’ if you think there’s anything missing.
• If you are the administrator of a group, you’ll be given the role of curator - so as well helping to keep Topics organised, you’ll have more of a say when it comes to rating posts and comments.

Over the coming weeks we’ll be working on ironing out all kinds of kinks - and we’d really appreciate your help. We base our updates on your feedback, so please let us know if you have any suggestions or comments.

As always, we’ve been hard at work on some site updates. We think there’s a few you might be interested in:

It’s now easier than ever before to log in to ResearchGate with your Facebook account: one click is all it takes. ResearchGate will even connect you with those of your Facebook friends who are already part of the ResearchGate community.

We want you to get the most out of ResearchGate; we’ve added a new contact suggestion tool to make connecting and collaborating with friends, colleagues and related researchers even more straightforward. Here’s how to get there: Home Feed » Under ‘Related Researchers’ on the right-hand side » Click ‘Show more’ From there you’ll be able to browse suggestions based on your institution, researchers you might know, people with similar research to you and people working in your field. 

As always, if you have any ideas or feedback let us know!

Add us on Facebook 

Follow us on Twitter

Or send us a message via our contact form.

One million members, one million researchers, one million brains.

A pretty smart guy once said: ‘it is good to rub and polish our brain against that of others’. - Michel de Montaigne

We think these are wise words indeed.

Today marks a milestone in the history of ResearchGate: over one million users are now networking, collaborating and sharing knowledge through our platform.

To connect one million people is to connect the potential of one million brains. One lone brain is already quite impressive; as proof we decided to put together a few facts on what it can do and what makes it tick:

• Our brains experience on average 70,000 thoughts each day.  Imagine that.

• A brain generates around 20 watts of power daily. That’s about enough to power a light bulb. Or a lot of ideas.

• 750 - 1,000 ml of blood flow through the brain every minute. You could fill 3 soda cans with all that. But it probably wouldn’t be as nice as a cold cola.

• There are 100,000 miles of blood vessels in the brain. About enough to circle the earth three times. Could get a bit messy though.

• 100 billion neurons go into making our brain what it is. Roughly the same amount as there are stars in our galaxy. That’s pretty mind-blowing.

If this is just one brain, imagine what one million could do together.

1,000,000 is a big number.  And we’re just getting started.