ResearchGate: Disseminating, communicating, and measuring Scholarship?

R esearch G ate is a social network site for academics to create their own profiles, list their publications, and interact with each other. Like Academia.edu, it provides a new way for scholars to disseminate their work and hence potentially changes the dynamics of informal scholarly communication. This article assesses whether R esearch G ate usage and publication data broadly reflect existing academic hierarchies and whether individual countries are set to benefit or lose out from the site. The results show that rankings based on R esearch G ate statistics correlate moderately well with other rankings of academic institutions, suggesting that R esearch G ate use broadly reflects the traditional distribution of academic capital. Moreover, while B razil, I ndia, and some other countries seem to be disproportionately taking advantage of R esearch G ate, academics in C hina, S outh K orea, and R ussia may be missing opportunities to use R esearch G ate to maximize the academic impact of their publications.