Survey on opinions and usage patterns for the ResearchGate platform

Based on a survey, the following study investigates opinions and also usage patterns relating to the ResearchGate social networking site for scientists and researchers. The survey consisted of 19 questions and was conducted online with 695 scientists from the disciplines of physics, biology, medicine, and neuroscience. Amongst other issues, the research questions concerned how much time and effort the interviewees expended on ResearchGate, what added value they perceived in using the site, the extent to which social aspects influence use, how participants planned to use the platform in future, and what role ResearchGate’s own metric, the RG score, played for the scientists. In addition, we discuss which of the factors of age, sex, origin, and scientific discipline have a decisive influence on the responses of the interviewees and which are of no statistical significance The results clearly show that the origin of the participants is frequently decisive, but that the remaining factors also have a considerable influence on the responses for more than 25% of the questions.