Research Performance of Top Cited Indian Researchers on ResearchGate Platform: An Altmetric Analysis

Over the last few decades, scholarly communication is changing with the use of social media serving as an effective medium. Several new factors have emerged in the context of social media activity to accelerate the shift. The current research relied on the ResearchGate platform, an Academic Social Networking Site (ASNS), meant for scientists and scholars enabling them to share, communicate, collaborate, connect and get updated with the feeds and scholarly information. The study focused on the top 15 cited Indian researchers and their research performance on ResearchGate. The research data was collected manually and analysed using several altmetric parameters available on ResearchGate to evaluate the performance of the targeted researchers. For statistical correlation analysis, the researcher relied on JASP statistical analysis software (v. 0.16.0.0). The study findings reveal that Sujit K Bhattacharya has the maximum citations (17210) among Indian researchers on ResearchGate, accompanied by the maximum number of publications (505), the highest value of h-index (70) and Research Interests (8991). The majority of the contributions from the targeted researchers are research articles (71.95%) and 49.10% are available in full text. Researcher S G Deshmukh has asked the maximum number of questions (22), and also provide a significant number of answers (314). The publications of researcher K. M. Singh (Res. 15) received a maximum number of Read (529397), and recommendations (3179). The RG Score of S G Deshmukh is the highest (57.00) among all of the targeted researchers. Pearson’s Correlations Test among five interconnected variables calculated that among 7 different types of correlation formation, “Citations - Res. Int.” (0.920), “Publications - Res. Int.” (0.865), “RG Score - Res. Int.” (0.773), and “Publications - RG Score” (0.765) pairs possess highly positive correlation linkage. The core context of this study is helpful for the representation of India in terms of top-cited researchers and their research performance on ResearchGate. The study also promotes young researchers to disseminate their research over such ASNS platforms to increase visibility and research impact.