With over five million members, ResearchGate is a very popular academic social networking site. It is free to join with your university email address. It is multidisciplinary in scope and has more features compared to its competitors thus supporting more mechanisms for dissemination and increased visibility of you and your research output. It can be used for sharing publications, connecting with colleagues, collaboration, Q&A and job searches. It allows members to create detailed profiles, upload files and monitor the impact of your outputs and your own activity in the network.
Metrics available in ResearchGate relate to:
Member profile views by country & by institution; Google referrals (for profiles).
Questions asked and answered; numbers of followers and RG Score (a score with an algorithm that is calculated based on how other researchers interact with your content).
Whilst ResearchGate is a useful tool for all of the reasons mentioned above, a note of caution: the platform has become somewhat of a mecca for copyright infringement with copies of publisher PDFs being posted to the site on a regular basis. Please ensure that you always check your publisher's terms and conditions in relation to sharing your publications online before posting to any site! If you have signed a copyright transfer agreement, you do not own the copyright, the publisher does!