We’re excited to introduce reads: a simple usage metric to show you exactly how much attention your research is getting online, in real time.
What are reads?
We’ve combined views and downloads because they say the same thing – that someone has read your work. A read is counted each time someone reads the summary or full-text, or downloads one of your publications from ResearchGate. Readers who are logged into the network and those who aren’t will be counted.
Why are reads important?
With reads, you can quickly see how often any of your articles, datasets, conference papers, and other research is being read. And your total reads give you an idea of how often all of your research is being seen online. We’ve also improved our ability to detect different sources of artificial traffic, which makes your stats a more true representation of interest in your work.
Update
You can now also see exactly how your work on ResearchGate is being read. Mouse over the interactive pie chart in the stats section of your profile to see a breakdown of your reads into:
On-page reads are counted when a researcher reads a publication on its ResearchGate page.
Summary reads are counted when a publication that is accessed only has metadata available, such as the title, abstract, and list of authors.
Private shares are counted when a researcher downloads a publication after receiving it via the Request full-text button on ResearchGate.
File downloads includes cases when a researcher downloads a publication hosted on ResearchGate, such as from a publication's ResearchGate page, or from a scholarly search engine such as Google Scholar.
Find out more about how your reads are calculated and please share your feedback with us.