I keep my RG account mainly for the "request full text" feature (which actually works very rarely). However, the activity over there in area of Bioinformatics seems to be as large if not larger than here. Are you an active RG user? Can you comment on their Q&A system? I had only answered once, the person who asked the question deleted my answer without any comment, so (obviously discouraged) I gave up. But I'm interested in opinions of others.
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Pawel Szczesny
They sure spam a lot so that turned me off their service altogether
Did you know that ResearchGate is spamming your colleagues (perhaps without your explicit consent)?
Yeah, I've seen that post. I deleted my account then registered again. This option isn't a default anymore.
My opinion on RG? I agree with Istvan but wish to rephrase it:
ResearchGate is a stupid, aggressively spamming vapor service. Just boycott their "services" altogether and they will slowly die is my recommendation.
They have sent me fake invitations to "claim your publication", "confirm authorship of ...", "XYZ has invited you to join RG". Of course, you don't need to claim authorship of your own papers, and nobody of the other people ever invited me. The thing that bothers me most is that this behavior is insulting the intellect of scientists by assuming they will fall for this bc.
They apparently have more active users than BioStar has. And questions about, let's say Gromacs, are answered within hours, while here are left unanswered after weeks from posting. These are of course random observations, but that's why I'm asking about real-life experience with their Q&A system, not opinions on the RG as a whole. I have my own opinion as well, which is not that different from yours, but that's another story.
Interesting, I did not even know that they had a Q&A. Are the pages visible without registration?
These pages are called "topics" and you can check questions in "bioinformatics" http://www.researchgate.net/topic/bioinformatics/ - my impressions were similar to Eric's (below), but I don't know how accurate these were.
Just another random obervation: on BioStar, out of 8 questions tagged Gromacs, 2 are unanswered. Also, RG is a totally intransparent and we can't validate or disprove their claims, they claim to have 2.8 million members for example. Given their aggressive spam-based marketing. And another random observation: none of the people who seemingly had send me an email via RG was actually (to their knowledge) a member, so possibly the actual amount of members on RG equates the number of author names they have successfully mined.
My overall impression of RG is very similar to both opinions already stated here. RG is an empty shell, a Facebook copycat for scientists without the social dimension and without much added value to science either. I have an account and do not do much there. From their activity, my contacts don't do much there either.
More specifically, for the Q&A part of the site, the quality of both questions and answers I saw there was so low that I would not consider posting a question on RG nor take the time to answer questions anymore. In fact, most of my comments were in a thread about the low quality standards of RG in the Q&A forum :)
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Dr.Mohd Deeb has invited you to join ResearchGate please follow this link: http://search.wikileaks.org/syria-files/?q=Researchgate
Gosh, Michael, I know RG is a spammy service, etc. Nevertheless in some areas outside of bioinformatics (but still science) it's quite a good source of knowledge. I don't want to prove RG is better than BioStar - I want to know if anybody invested enough time in their forum system to get informed opinion on it.
Sorry, I couldn't resist it xD (but maybe ill keep that name btw)... Hope someone has something serious to contribute.