There are now many different ways to increase your research visibility: Google Scholar, laboratory/faculty/industry or even personal websites, and LinkedIn, to name a few.
In your opinion, how does ResearchGate fit into all of this? Is it really a good way of increasing the visibility of your publications and finding fellows with common research interests, or is it just a "waste of time"?
It's hard to predict how this will develop in the future. As is, I have yet to hear any positive success stories from my peers. All I've heard of ResearchGate are complaints about their invitation spam.
If you sign up (or are already signed up), make sure to carefully check all settings. There are some "hidden" settings that will repeatedly send out "Invitations" and even "Invitation reminders" to your peers (make sure to disable this right at signup time, before "claiming" a single paper!). You can imagine that if your peer gets a dozen of them each week, he will get annoyed. And ReseachGate uses your name for the invitation, so he will get annoyed at you.
Before "requesting" a paper on Researchgate, make sure they have signed up. Otherwise, use regular email (even better, just use regular email right away!) When you request a paper from a non-user, they will be sent an invitation letter, but they cannot answer without joining: ResearchGate does not include contact information in your request!?!
Other than that, I have the impression that ResearchGate is mostly used by students, not by established researchers. Therefore, do not expect many high-quality interactions to happen.
Most of my peers that were on RG once, seem to have left. This is not a good sign.
If they don't manage to get high-quality interactions to happen soon, their name may end up remaining associated with spam. They may have been too aggressive at boosting their user numbers quickly. The overall idea is good, but they need to find a way to get quality contributions, not only quantity. As is, I see them only strong on the quantitative side so far...
Honestly, in my opinion, there is one thing really important for the visibility of your research:
If you make it easy for others to build upon your work, they are more likely to do so. In particular, you must make it easier to build upon your work, than on alternatives. Making an RG profile does not really help; effectively it just means your data is spread to one more site. Instead, put a lot of information on your homepage.
Here is an example. I'm convinced that one of the reasons why he has been very successful is that you can download data and software and tutorials right on his homepage. Compare to his ResearchGate profile (I was even surprised he has one) - it's a dead duck, absolutely useless. A Google Scholar Profile may be much more useful, as it will be linked from any article, making it easy for people to reach your other publications. Again, the same example: Google Scholar does a much better job at providing an automatic publication list for you.
IMHO, Google Scholar is a must, because the profile will make it easier to get updated on your other publications. I visit Scholar profiles quite often; in particular to see the latest and the most cited work of an author of which I already have discovered a good article.
My experience with ResearchGate has been negative. I was searching for a paper online, and a ResearchGate page came up. I signed up as a member because they promised to send me a pdf of the paper. They never sent it and instead sent unrelated spam.
I personally find one aspect of ResearchGate very useful, although I find that its benefit for me is only in small part due to any effect it has on my research visibility. Perhaps others can say more. But I do find it very helpful for keeping up with the state-of-the-art in my area.
I’m in an interdisciplinary social/medical science field where people publish in a very wide range of journals, and I try to keep track of several pieces of literature. So for me ResearchGate, in letting me follow researchers to see what they’ve published recently, is a nice complement to journal Tables of Contents. It’s a nice way to keep track of what others are working on without too much effort. I choose to follow both researchers I’ve met and strangers who recently published a useful article and might publish more in the same area.
To do this, I have the settings organized so that I am not following any “interesting Topics”, only people. This avoids having questions and answers in my live feed (which I find totally useless). Consequently, my live feed contains only new articles other academics in my fields are adding, and going through this from time to time in a moment of procrastination is fantastically useful. Of course, using ResearchGate in this way is only worth it if a large-ish proportion of researchers in your sub-fields are on the site.
ResearchGate is a counterproductive vehicle for the spread of publication news. It does an incredibly sloppy job of assembling information on scholars (e.g., catches only about 350 of my over 1000 citations at ISI and 3500 at Google Scholar and Hazing's Publish or Perrish). It lures one in with an appeal to recognition of other authors who are friends or co-authors.
Perhaps its operations are guided by the old Russian adage that "if something is worth doing, it's worth doing wrong."
I've been using ResearchGate for about three years now. At first, I would also get a lot of emails from them: Weekly stats, "people are noticing your work", are you an author of this paper?". I played with my settings and the undesirable ones stopped; completely, or somehow my junk filter picked it up. Now I pretty much get no email from them.
On the positive side:
So there. It's a net asset for me.
Caveat: Some people claim that seemingly-unrelated solicitations to publish in obscure venues - which I do receive - are due to my RG presence or even due to RG passing on aggregated data to such advertisers. I can't say to what degree this is the case. But even this possibility does not change my bottom line view.
I was never a member of ResearchGate or tried to be one. But at one point I was spammed with emails from ResearchGate of former collaborators, with whom I published or did not publish, and it still goes on. There are also researchers included who I personally don't know.
I was asked constantly to confirm the authorship of some of my papers. This turned me completely off, and I think it is simply a spam company. A company, which wants to do serious business does not use this kind of method.
I think that ResearchGate can be a useful tool to promote your research and contact peers, if you invest quite some time in it. It does not happen automatically. You must work to find people with relevant work for you, and follow them (and also occasionally unfollow some people) - so that you get a minimally lively and relevant news feed.
As scholarly communication goes, until now I have only received a letter from a professor via RG, but he was an established figure, so I was really happy to get a message from him. I also promptly started to read his older publications which were great, so this was an added benefit. That is, I think the best advantage of ResearchGate consists in how it creates alternative paths for exploring the scholarship universe: instead of jumping from text to text you jump from text to author to text. This is more lively and it leads you on surprising paths, sometimes.
Also, I enjoy finding established scholars from my interest topics on RG (and Academia.edu), browsing through all their publications, and clicking "Follow". I like the idea of a connection with them - especially when, occasionally, they "follow" back. It's a variety of entertainment, I guess.
Still, in terms of visibility, I think that my publications do get more views and downloads compared to my personal site - well, partly because I don't know how many they get there. At least, I can say that it gives me occasional joy when I see some view & download numbers on ResearchGate. (All these considerations also apply to Academia.edu, which has a much nicer - or not so evil- marketing strategy).
I think it is worth mentioning that ResearchGate's policy on invitations has improved. This is what they say on the matter:
One way to make sure that your publications gain maximum exposure among your peers is by inviting your co-authors to join you on ResearchGate when you add publications to your profile. If you’d like your co-authors to join you, just make sure that the Invite my co-authors to ResearchGate box is checked when you’re adding publications and, where possible, an invitation will be sent to them. By clicking Preview, you can also choose which of your co-authors you would like to invite. Invitations will only be sent to the co-authors selected; ResearchGate does not email your co-authors on your behalf without your knowledge or consent.
You can customize your Invitation settings at any time. To do this, go to your Invitation settings and choose which of your co-authors you would like to invite by selecting them from the list. If you would like to disable invitations entirely, simply click Turn off all. If you have turned off invitations, you can always turn them back on again by selecting Turn on all. We take personal data and anti-spam policies very seriously; our processes are compliant with European and U.S. regulations and are audited on a regular basis.
There are still plenty of problems with the site. Here is an extensive list of things a computer scientist thinks should be addressed http://ptbcs.blogspot.ca. He seems to be keeping the list updated with new problems or improvements.
ResearchGate has only sent invitations from me to two people. One of those I was unhappy that they had sent an invitation as it was not clear they would do that. But I immediately realised this would be an issue and disabled the setting.
I think ResearchGate has huge potential and many benefits if used appropriately. But as @Cosima mentioned, you need to invest some time setting things up, making sure the settings are appropriate. Facebook went through similar problems with privacy and has since improved. When I first joined the site several years ago, I was hugely disappointed and quickly realised that I would have to wait and see if it amounted to anything. I finally feel like the site is going down the right path. Most of my colleagues and peers are now on the site, I see their citation updates and the metrics are improving. I recognise the site's current major flaws, but am optimistic about its future role in the research community.
ResearchGate is pretty much like Linkedin or Academia.edu. I prefer Academia.edu because it doesn't send me an email every time someone looks at my profile. At the same time, Academia.edu doesn't look as visually aesthetic as ResearchGate. On the other hand, you have Linkedin which is for professionals, not really academics. However, a lot of academics are now setting up their profiles because Linkedin is most likely the first place employers or other researchers go first.
In my opinion, it's not bad to have an account in as many places as possible to allow as many people as possible to see your profile. You can also sign up on Google Scholar and it will assign your papers to your profile, or you can insert papers that Google does not find.
Basically, it's entirely up to you and how you want your information to be spread!
I don't really think that ResearchGate is a waste of time.
EDIT:
As this answer was being downvoted because it was not originally focused on ResearchGate, following I try to explain why this social network is not a waste of time for me.
You can already search for journal articles and or researchers in Google Scholar and Scopus, to name just a few. ResearchGate gives a social approach to it. InResearchGate you can follow researchers, so that you can get notified when any of them publishes new papers, for instance. Moreover, you can set your profile and tell other researchers what you are dealing with, what topics you are interested in, and so on.
I think it could still be quite more useful if some functionalities were added (maybe adding the ability to create, announce, and promote à-la-Facebook events, which means conferences, workshops, symposiums, etc., for instance), but it is actually becoming the social network for scientific researchers, in my humble perception.
THE REST OF THE ORIGINAL ANSWER:
I personally recommend having your own academic profile on the following social networks/tools:
Optional but also interesting:
Twitter, A simple and fast way to share short messages, interesting pieces of info, etc. with your audience, whoever they are.
About.me or similar, A kind of landing page that you can configure to show all your very basic information, together with links to all your Internet profiles, etc. all with a minimalist and nice touch. You can add it to your e-mail signature.
A blog, Basically a place where you can say things. It could be integrated into your website.
