ResearchGate Metrics’ Behavior and Its Correlation with RG Score and Scopus Indicators

Objective: Social networking sites are appropriate tools for sharing and exposing scientific works to increase citations. The objectives of the present study are to investigate the activity of Iranian scholars in the medical sciences in ResearchGate and to explore the effect of each of the four ResearchGate metrics on the RG score. Moreover, the citation metrics of the faculty members in Scopus and the relationship between these metrics and the RG score were explored. Methods: The study population included all SBMU faculty members who have profiles in ResearchGate (N=950). The data were collected through ResearchGate and Scopus in January 2021. The Spearman correlation coefficient was applied to examine the relationship between ResearchGate metrics and Scopus indicators as well as to determine the effect of each ResearchGate metric on the RG score. Results: The findings revealed that the publication sharing metric had the highest correlation (0.918) with the RG score and had the greatest impact on it (p-value <0.001), while the question asking metric showed the lowest correlation (0.11). Moreover, there was a significant relationship between the RG score and Scopus citation metrics (p-value <0.05). Furthermore, all four RG metrics had a positive and significant relationship with Scopus indicators (p-value <0.05), in which the number of shared publications had the highest correlation compared to other RG metrics. Conclusion: Researchers’ participation in the ResearchGate social network is effective in increasing citation indicators. Therefore, more activity in the ResearchGate social network may have favorable results in improving universities’ ranking.