From sociability to creditability for academics

Social networking for academic exchanges, such as through sites like Researchgate.net, is gaining popularity among academics. This site offers many metrics (e.g. RG score and RG impact points) which have the potential to become universal research performance metrics. This paper presents an empirical survey of the top 150 researchers' grants and their RG scores among 126 colleges of management in Taiwan. Our results show a strong correlation between the research grants and RG scores if the analysis is based on the college as a whole. However, the relationship becomes insignificant for individual researchers. In addition, colleges with the AACSB accreditation outperform AACSB member schools and non-member schools in terms of their research grants and sharing research outputs on ResearchGate. The authors conclude that metrics used on ResearchGate have the potential to become formal research performance evaluation tools. However, this time has not come yet, at least based on the experience of Taiwan.