The ResearchGate Score: a good example of a bad metric

The ResearchGate Score: a good example of a bad metric

According to ResearchGate, the academic social networking site,
their RG Score is “a new way to measure your scientific reputation”.
With such high aims, Peter Kraker, Katy Jordan and Elisabeth Lex
take a closer look at the opaque metric. By reverse engineering the
score, they find that a significant weight is linked to ‘impact points’ –
a similar metric to the widely discredited journal impact factor. Transparency
in metrics is the only way scholarly measures can be put into context
and the only way biases – which are inherent in all socially created
metrics – can be uncovered.