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Scholarly Publications: Creating and Maintaining a ResearchGate Profile

• Getting Started
• Editing your Profile

Adding publications to your ResearchGate profile

Academic journal copyright policies.

• Adding Full Text

If you have questions you may find the following ResearchGate link helpful.

How to add research (researchgate.net)

If you are using a mobile device, you can also view a PDF version of this guide with screenshots .

In general, authors who publish articles in academic journals are required to sign a copyright transfer agreement, which grants the journal's publisher copyright for the article.  This limits whether the full text of an article can be posted on sites like ResearchGate (citations for any article may be posted anywhere, including RG).  

The guide below contains a chart with guidelines detailing whether articles from specific journals may be posted on ResearchGate.

• Scholarly Publications: Posting Journal Articles Online by Nicholas Cummins Last Updated May 20, 2021 111 views this year
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Understanding Academia.edu and ResearchGate

← go back to the impact challenge table of contents.

We’ll be honest – we thought long and hard about including this chapter and its activities in the OU Impact Challenge. Academia.edu and ResearchGate both seem attractive to scholars, but they also have their share of disadvantages and downsides.    Ultimately, we decided to include this information, because so many of you at OU have accounts on these two sites. A quick search turns up 3,849 OU-affiliated users on Academia.edu and 4,731 on ResearchGate! But instead of diving right into the “how tos,” we think it’s especially important to place these two sites into context and preface them with important considerations.

Consideration #1: You Are Not the Customer

Consideration #2: You Might Be Breaking the Law

Another consideration with these particular services is the legality of uploading your work there. Most publishers require authors to sign a publication agreement/copyright transfer prior to a manuscript being published which outlines what you can/cannot do with your own work in the future (we will cover this in Chapter 11 of the OU Impact Challenge). Uploading your work – especially a publisher’s pdf – to a site such as Academia.edu or ResearchGate may be a violation of the terms of the publishing agreement, whereas uploading it to an institutional repository may not be (or can be negotiated not to be). Several years ago, a major academic publisher actively went after Academia.edu, requiring them to take down all of the publisher’s content that had been illegally uploaded, much to the surprise and dismay of these authors. And Academia.edu is not the only target . Earlier this year ResearchGate was set to take down nearly 7 million articles or about 40% of their content.

Consideration #3: Understand the Privacy Implications

Finally, some of these sites’ tactics are troubling from the standpoint of privacy and intellectual freedom. Personally and professionally, many find it distressing that a private company, which doesn’t adhere to the same professional ethics as librarians and other scholars do, collects information about who is reading what. Academia.edu, in particular, then offers to share that information with you if you subscribe to their “premium service.” And while their analytics dashboard doesn’t reveal readers’ names, it may provide enough information for you to know exactly who read your work.    You may decide not to pay for Academia.edu’s premium service, but even so – what you view and download will still be tracked. This may not be troubling to you (the “I’m not doing anything wrong, so I don’t care” argument), but we think it sets a bad precedent. What about tracking researchers who study terrorism? Or whistleblowing? Or even climate change? How might people at these academic social media companies create profiles and make judgments about you based on what you are reading? And what will they do with the information they collect, especially if asked for it by government entities?    We’ve posted some additional reading and resources below. And we will continue to cover some of these topics in the future, since they are highly relevant to sharing scholarly work. If you’re still interested in Academia.edu and/or ResearchGate after reading these articles, we’ve gone ahead and included those activities further down below. We’ve purposefully kept these activities brief, at least for now.     

• A Social Networking Site is Not an Open Access Repository , by Katie Fortney and Justin Gonder
• I Have a Lot of Questions: RG, ELS, SN, STM, and CRS , by Lisa Janicke Hinchliffe
• Dear Scholars, Delete Your Account At Academia.Edu , by Sarah Bond
• Academia, Not Edu , by Kathleen Fitzpatrick
• Reading, Privacy, and Scholarly Networks , by Kathleen Fitzpatrick
• Upon Leaving Academia.edu , by G. Geltner
• Should You #DeleteAcademiaEdu , by Paolo Mangiafico
• Should This Be the Last Thing You Read on Academia.edu? , by Gary Hall (downloads as a .pdf)

Make Profiles on Academia.edu and ResearchGate

You know all those things you wish your CV was smart enough to do – embed your papers, automatically give you readership statistics, and so on? Academia.edu and ResearchGate are two academic social networks that allow you to do these things and then some.    They’re also places where your some of your colleagues are spending their time. Actively participating on one or both networks may give you an opportunity to have greater reach with other researchers. And getting your publications and presentations onto these sites legally will make it easier for others to encounter your work. They do this not only through the social network they help you build, but also by improving the search engine optimization (SEO) of your research, making you much more “Googleable.”    Both platforms allow you to do the following:     

• Create a profile that summarizes your research
• Upload your publications, so others can find them
• Find and follow other researchers, so you can receive automatic updates on their new publications
• Find and read others’ publications
• See platform-specific metrics that indicate the readership and reach you have on those sites

Let’s dig into the basics of setting up profiles and uploading your work on these sites.

Getting Started on Academia.edu

Fill Out Your Profile

Now it’s time to add your OU affiliation and interests to your profile. Adding an OU affiliation will add you to a subdomain of Academia.edu which will allow you to more easily find your colleagues. The site will try to guess your affiliation based on your email address or IP address; make any corrections needed and add your department information and title.    Then, add your research interests. These are also important; they’ll help others find you and your work.

Connect With Others

Now let’s connect with your colleagues who are already on Academia.edu. You can either connect your Facebook account or an email account to Academia.edu, which will search your contacts and suggest connections.    You now have an Academia.edu profile! You can continue to spruce it up by adding more publications, as well as adding a photo of yourself, other research interests and publications, and connecting your Academia profile to the other services we’ve covered like ORCiD , GoogleScholar , Twitter , and LinkedIn . See how this might be coming together?!?

Academia.edu Homework

Now that you have a profile, set aside half an hour to explore two uses of Academia.edu:     

• Exploring “research interests” in order to discover other researchers and publications; and
• Getting more of your most important publications online; and

Make a Profile on ResearchGate

Next, we’ll help you with the other major player in the scholarly social network space, ResearchGate. ResearchGate claims 15 million users, and it will help you connect with many researchers who aren’t on Academia.edu. It can also help you understand your readers through platform-specific metrics, and confirm your status as a helpful expert in your field with their “Q&A” feature.    Given ResearchGate’s similarity to Academia.edu, we won’t rehash the basics of setting up a profile and getting your publications online. Go ahead and sign up, set up your account (remember to add detailed affiliation information and a photo), and add a publication or two.    Got your basic profile up and running? Great! Let’s drill down into those three unique features of ResearchGate.

Find other researchers & publications

• Top co-authors

ResearchGate Score & Stats

Limitations

We’ve covered many of the limitations of Academia.edu and ResearchGate in the first section of this chapter. But there is yet another one. It has been pointed out that Academia.edu and ResearchGate are information silos – you put information and effort into the site, but you can’t easily extract and reuse it later. This is absolutely correct. That’s a big downside of these services and a great reason to make sure you’ve claimed your ORCiD in Chapter 1 .    One solution to this drawback (and the ones mentioned above) is to limit the amount of time you spend adding new content to your profiles on these sites, and instead use them as a kind of “landing page” that can simply help others find you and three or four of your most important publications. Even if you don’t have all your publications on either site, their social networking features may still be useful to make connections and increase readership for your most important work.

ResearchGate Homework

Content for the OU Impact Challenge has been derived from “ The 30-Day Impact Challenge ” by Stacy Konkiel © ImpactStory and used here under a CC BY 4.0 International License.

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Important changes to our services. find out more, q. how do i reference articles and papers located on research gate.

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Answered By: Rebecca Eyres Last Updated: Dec 16, 2021     Views: 1359

Research Gate (RG) is an online academic networking platform, on which researchers and academics upload their research papers, articles, chapters and other types of publications. The version of the paper may be the published version, for example if it is open access. However, if it is not open access the RG version may not be the final published version. When this is the case often the RG version will be missing essential information you need for your reference. Because of this, it is important to check for the most up to date version and consult this version to ensure it includes the same information you are using in your work. If available, you will also have the required information to cite and reference it accurately. When trying to locate a more up to date/published version, first try using Library Search , entering the title of the paper into the search box. For papers on RG that are chapters you may need to search for the book title, rather than the chapter title. If you are unable to locate it on Library Search, try searching Google . This search will also retrieve the RG version so you will need to check the results to see if the paper is located on another website. Once located, you should have more detail of the type of source it is and be able to identify the reference type to follow in the MMU Harvard referencing guide .

If you are unable to locate the paper anywhere else and there are minimal details on a paper on Research Gate, for example, only Author, Year and Title, with no other details to identify the publication type (e.g. book, journal, conference or publisher details) the only option would be to reference it following the format for a Webpage . However, please note, without any publication details, it is difficult to assess the academic quality and rigor of the paper, and therefore whether you can rely on it as substantial evidence in your assessed work.

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Is it legal to add your publications to ResearchGate?

I recently created a profile on ResearchGate . And to add your publications list it requires you to upload the paper. Is it legal to upload published journal articles on public servers, where everyone can download it for free?

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• 13 it requires you to upload the paper — Actually, the software only requires you to upload a PDF file. If you're worried about legality of uploading a paper, you can always upload a substitute PDF file containing the sentence "This paper is available from the publisher at (url/DOI)." –  JeffE Commented Aug 30, 2015 at 18:37
• 11 You don't even have to upload your papers. Or did they change anything in the past couple of days? –  choener Commented Aug 30, 2015 at 21:05
• 6 Don't use researchgate at all. They are spammers & There are only students there, no experts. And everybody uses Google Scholar to search, so simply upload it on your personal home page / institutional repository if permitted by the license agreement. –  Has QUIT--Anony-Mousse Commented Oct 3, 2016 at 16:58
• 1 @nxkryptor Are you going to select one answer among the ones having been published? –  Vicent Commented Nov 2, 2016 at 9:25
• 2 @Anony-Mousse in my field, plenty of senior scholars are on ResearchGate, and it's the first place many people look for things. –  Flyto Commented Dec 15, 2016 at 7:45

6 Answers 6

First of all, as far as I know, ResearchGate does not require uploading PDF files in order to add your research work to your profile in this website. However, it is very important to explore the possibility of uploading them, as it gives more visibility to your research and makes it available to more people. That is why I think your question is very interesting.

As @AnonymousMathematician and @gawdzilla already said, it all depends on the policy and agreements established by the publisher. You should ask the publisher. Period.

Now, I want to add some extra information about the alternatives we have to share our research without breaking any publishing agreement or rule.

Normally, there are several versions of a paper till it gets finally published:

a. The editor version : This is the final version of the paper, as it is published in the journal, with all the copyright stuff and so on. It is the final PDF , let us say, the one you normally keep as a record of your research.

b. The author version : This normally refers to an accepted version of the manuscript. It is the version that is finally qualified by the reviewers and accepted to publish by the editor. It is just your manuscript, just raw text (and tables and figures and so on), not usually formatted with the final journal style. Sometimes it is also called a postprint version .

c. A preprint version: It is also a sort of author version, but it usually refers to the submitted manuscript version before the reviewers do their job. It is the first (submitted) version of your manuscript.

So, in fact, I've listed them in a sort of reverse chronological order. :D

Now, if you want to make your research as visible and accessible as possible in ResearchGate (or other scientific social networks such as Academia.edu , etc.), which possibilities do you have? Let us see:

• You can upload the final (editor) version of your paper, as long as the publisher allows you to do that, but I do not think this happens very often. [Actually, there are some journals that follow an open-access policy, meaning that the authors keep the copyright of their work. But, anyway, you have to follow and stick to the final publishing agreement and see if you are allowed to distribute your paper by yourself, etc.]

If not, you do have other options:

You can upload the author version. You should also check with the publisher if you are allowed to do so. Sometimes there is an embargo or vesting period and, after that period, you are allowed to publish or distribute the author version of your paper on your own.

You can upload the preprint version. Publishers normally allow authors to publish or distribute preprints of their manuscripts, normally as technical reports. Anyway, you should ask the publisher, just in case.

If none of the above options apply, then you always have the option of adding this text at the end of the 'abstract' field in the ResearchGate record for your paper:

[ Full text available at http://... ]

Now, I want to add some practical examples from my own experience. Hope it helps.

In my case, I usually publish the preprint version of my papers as technical reports in the official repository of my university department . It is a quite common practice among some researchers in my field. Among other benefits, it prevents evil reviewers or editors to copy or plagiarise your research. Anyway, as I told you above, you should check with the publisher whether you are allowed to do so or not.

Now, this is an example of case (3): https://www.researchgate.net/publication/273349919_Optimal_Design_of_Pre-control_Plans , which contains a preprint version of this article that was already published as a technical report.

And here you have an example of case (4): https://www.researchgate.net/publication/45101373_Predicting_the_duration_of_chemotherapy-induced_neutropenia_new_scores_and_validation , which contains the abstract for this article I have coauthored. I will upload the author version in February 2017, when the 36-month embargo period finishes, according to the publisher rules. [Well, it is not actually an example of case (4), as you can see a full version of a preprint in this ResearchGate record. But the preprint is quite different from the final version in this case, so when I am allowed to upload the author version, it will replace the current preprint version.]

As a final remark, please, notice that it is not technically the same publish a research paper than just disseminate , distribute or propagate it. However, I have used them as synonyms in this answer, as sometimes it makes no real difference in the context of your question. [Actually, I think (I am not sure of this) that what you do in ResearchGate when you upload an author or a preprint version of a paper you have coauthored is not techincally publishing it...]

Hope it helps. Any comments to this answer will be welcomed. It is always good to learn new things... :)

• 1 @nxkryptor This should be the correct answer. –  Astor Florida Commented Jul 14, 2016 at 9:36

Is it legal to upload published journal articles on public servers, where everyone can download it for free?

It depends on the publishing agreement you signed, which should specify which rights the authors and the publisher hold. The allocation of rights depends on the journal (and the field you are working in), and sometimes there are modifications or addenda for a specific paper.

You should keep copies of the publishing agreements for your papers, precisely so you can refer to them at times like this. If you don't have them, you can get an approximation by looking on the journal's website to see what their current policies are. The policies could have changed over time (and in principle the publisher could still enforce a stricter policy you agreed to in the past), but it's probably safe to post a paper online if the publisher allows it as part of the current publishing agreement. If you're feeling nervous, you could always ask the publisher whether you could follow the terms of the current publishing agreement for your paper that was published long ago.

• 6 You can check on Sherpa/Romeo the standard policy of most publishers, even if it does not replace completely checking what you signed. –  Benoît Kloeckner Commented Aug 31, 2015 at 13:04
• 1 Researchgate recently added a binding arbitration clause to their terms of service, taking effect 1 Dec 2017. I stronger encourage people to delete their accounts. –  daaxix Commented Nov 8, 2017 at 11:32

As mentioned in the other answers, it depends on your contract with your publisher.

http://www.howcanishareit.com/ indicates given a DOI whether a paper may be shared on ResearchGate or similar websites:

Also, as Benoît Kloeckner mentions in a comment, the RoMEO Journals database contains thousands of journals, labeled with their archiving policy ( preprint / postprint /publisher's version):

Except of the database:

Of course, your contract is the reference, whereas those two resources are just approximations.

PS: ResearchGate has quite a bad reputation due to its spam/impersonation/etc. tendencies e.g. see Should I send a "cease-and-desist" letter to ResearchGate?

In most cases, is not legal at all. Normally you should only post the author version or post-print which is an accepted version of the manuscript. And always respect the embargo period (12-24 months...) Anyway, you should always check your Copyright Transfer Agreement. In many cases it's legal to post the author version in your institutional repository but not in ResearchGate

I've attended publishing talks from publishers. As advised by some above, it is necessary to check with the publisher for publishing guidelines.

Usually, you have to wait for the paper to be published. Then, if the publisher allows, you can upload your manuscript copy.

BUT do always check with the publisher in question to avoid violating any terms.

When you published your paper, you did transfer the copyright to the publisher. You did have to at least agree to, or even sign the "Copyright transfer form". It is a legal contract, and it governs your rights, depending on the publisher/journal policy.

Different publishers have different (default) policies regarding the rights, retained by the authors (I am talking here about Springer, Elsevier, IEEE, etc.) Some of them allow you the publication of your paper on your page, but not on specialized sites (like Researchgate), since those are their direct competition. Some of them allow you only the publication of final submitted manuscript, before publisher's editing was applied, on your web page, etc.

Please read the copyright policy of individual journal or even better, publisher. In case of conference papers, it depends on the publisher of the proceedings - if the organizers did publish the proceedings themselves without the external publishing house, ask them (but usually they will be fine with publication elsewhere).

So, to sum up:

1) Read what you signed when you submitted your paper to the journal/conference - the "Copyright transfer form" 2) if 1) is impractical or impossible, check the copyright policy of the journal/proceedings publisher. 3) As a last resort, ask the publisher.

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