title: ResearchGate is no longer reliable: leniency towards ghost journals may decrease its impact on the scientific community.
abstract: ResearchGate has been regarded as one of the most attractive academic social networking site for scientific community. It has been trying to improve user-centered interfaces to gain more attractiveness to scientists around the world. Display of journal related scietometric measures (such as impact factor, 5-year impact, cited half-life, eigenfactor) is an important feature in ResearchGate. Open access publishing has added more to increased visibility of research work and easy access to information related to research. Moreover, scientific community has been much interested in promoting their work and exhibiting its impact to others through reliable scientometric measures. However, with the growing market of publications and improvements in the field of research, this community has been victimized by the cybercrime in the form of ghost journals, fake publishers and magical impact measures. Particularly, ResearchGate more recently, has been lenient in its policies against this dark side of academic writing. Therefore, this communication aims to discuss concerns associated with leniency in ResearchGate policies and its impact of scientific community.
authors.affiliation: Institute of Physiotherapy and Rehabilitation Sciences, Peoples University of Medical & Health Sciences for Women, Nawabshah, Sindh, Pakistan.
authors.forename: Aamir Raoof
authors.initials: AR
authors.lastname: Memon
mesh_terms: D003142:Communication; D055811:Journal Impact Factor; D010506:Periodicals as Topic / Q000592:standards*; D011643:Publishing; D014956:Writing
keywords: Impact factor, Journal, Open access publishing, Ethics in publishing, Research misconduct.