Impact of researchgate on increasing citations and usage counts of hot papers in clinical medicine indexed in web of science

Abstract

The purpose of this research was to conduct a comparative study of the impact of ResearchGate indicators on increasing citation and usage counts of hot papers in clinical medicine indexed in the Web of Science (WoS) database. This is an applied research and has been performed using scientometric methods. Article titles, the number of citations, "Usage count last 180 days", "Usage count since 2013", publication year, and authors of 583 hot papers in clinical medicine were extracted from the WoS database. Then, the readership and citation counts of articles were extracted from ResearchGate social network. The data were analyzed by descriptive and analytical statistics using Microsoft Excel and SPSS 21. The results showed that there was a significant relationship between the number of received citations, both usage counts in WoS and ResearchGate indicators (P value ≤ 0.01). Self-archiving in scientific social networking sites such as ResearchGate may be effective on visibility of articles that may also be related to their received citations.