ResearchGate is a European commercial social networking site for scientists and researchers[2] to share papers, ask and answer questions, and find collaborators.

[6] While reading articles does not require registration, people who wish to become site members need to have an email address at a recognized institution or to be manually confirmed as a published researcher in order to sign up for an account.

RG Scores have been reported to be correlated with existing author-level metrics, but have also been criticized as having questionable reliability and an unknown calculation methodology.

[20] ResearchGate was founded in 2008[11] by virologist Ijad Madisch, who remains the company's CEO,[4][3] with physician Sören Hofmayer, and computer scientist Horst Fickenscher.

[6] Madisch has said the company's business strategy is focused on highly targeted advertising based on analysis of the activities of users, saying "Imagine you could click on a microscope mentioned in a paper and buy it", and estimating the spending on science at $1 trillion per year under the control of a "relatively small number of people".

[4] In November 2015 they acquired additional funding of $52.6 million from a range of investors including Goldman Sachs, Benchmark Capital, Wellcome Trust and Bill Gates, but did not announce this until February 2017.

[32] Academic reception of ResearchGate remains generally positive, as recent reviews of extant literature show an accepting audience with broad coverage of concepts.

29 percent of regular visitors had signed up for a profile on ResearchGate in the past year,[5] and 35% of the survey participants were invited by email.

[19] In the context of the big deal cancellations by several library systems in the world, the wide usage of ResearchGate was credited as one of the factors which reduced the apparent value of the subscriptions to toll access resources.

[35] Data analysis tools like Unpaywall Journals, used by libraries to calculate the real costs and value of their options before such decisions,[36] allow to separate ResearchGate from open archives like institutional repositories, which are considered more stable.

ResearchGate's decision to not remove convicted sex offenders from its social networking site has been criticized by Canadian authorities.

Many researchers world-wide deleted their account in protest as they refused to remove convicted child pornographer and registered sex offender in Canada, Ben Levin as a user.

[28] A study published by the Association for Information Systems in 2014 found that a dormant account on ResearchGate, using default settings, generated 297 invitations to 38 people over a 16-month period, and that the user profile was automatically attributed to more than 430 publications.

[39] Furthermore, journalists and researchers found that the RG score, calculated by ResearchGate via a proprietary algorithm,[39] can reach high values under questionable circumstances.

[44][9][45] In September 2017, lawyers representing the International Association of Scientific, Technical, and Medical Publishers (STM) sent a letter to ResearchGate threatening legal action against them for copyright infringement and demanding that they alter their handling of uploaded articles to include pre-release checking for copyright violations and "Specifically, [for ResearchGate to] end its extraction of content from hosted articles and the modification of any hosted content, including any and all metadata.

[54] Subsequently, Coalition for Responsible Sharing (CfRS) reported that "ResearchGate has removed from public view a significant number of copyrighted articles it is hosting on its site".

[56] ResearchGate has managed to achieve an agreement on article uploading with three other major publishers, Springer Nature, Cambridge University Press and Thieme.