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

It is a very exciting week for ResearchGATE, the largest scientific collaboration that exists today. We are currently featured on Businessweek- Innovation Channel as the leading tool which helps scientists connect and collaborate. The article, written by Steve Hamm explains how scientists are leveraging ResearchGATE to connect with other scientists from all over the world. This also shows that with tools like ResearchGATE, there are no boundaries. 

Here is an excerpt from the article-

Madisch, who has a medical degree and a PhD, was born in Germany to Syrian parents and lives in Boston. He got the idea for ResearchGATE when he was doing graduate work in radiology at Harvard Medical School in 2007. He was frustrated because he knew of only a half-dozen others who were working on projects related to his research into improving the resolution of medical imagery. Then he learned about a potential collaborator's research through the man's Facebook page. Madisch had experienced the power of social networking, and he decided to develop a Web site that could offer connections and collaboration tools to researchers worldwide. He launched the site in May 2008, and already 180,000 researchers from more than 200 countries are using it regularly.

The full article can be found here

An extensive article written by Globe and Mail's Mathew Ingram has been published on the leading internet site- Internet Evolution.This is just another sign that social media and online collaboration is really opening the door for scientists to connect with each other.

Here is an excerpt from the article itself:

The idea that the Internet might be used for scientific collaboration shouldn't come as much of a surprise, since the Web's predecessor was originally created as a way to connect researchers at different institutions so they could solve problems together.

Another open-source science project is Bizarro's Bioinformatics Organization, which started in 1998 and uses wiki software to let researchers post models, questions, experiments, and discoveries related to biology and "informatics." Scientists were "looking for a central location for their open source projects," founder Jeff Bizarro told LinuxInsider. Today, the organization has 27,000 members from all around the world.

You can read the whole article here- http://bit.ly/7FZlCw

It has been one year since ResearchGATE.net was launched, and the ResearchGATE team would like to extend its gratitude to all the research scientists who have joined the community.  You have made ResearchGATE's first year astoundingly successful, and year two promises to be even more exciting.

ResearchGATE's ambition is to promote communication among scientists across the globe.   The professional goals of research scientists demand a commensurately professional online network that is tailored to the needs of serious research.  With a rich set of communication tools to enhance professional networking, ResearchGATE's platform has already attracted scientists from over 190 countries.

In the upcoming year, we will work tirelessly to guarantee that scientists on ResearchGATE will derive as much value as possible from their participation in the network.  Our goal remains to reduce research redundancy and increase efficiency for all the scientists we are privileged to count as members of our community.

The ResearchGATE Team