Which Academic Papers Do Researchers Tend to Feature on ResearchGate?

Introduction: The academic social network site ResearchGate (www.researchgate.net) enables researchers to feature up to five of their research products (including papers, datasets and chapters) in a 'Featured research' section on their ResearchGate home page. This provides an opportunity to discover how researchers view their own publications. Method: We investigated ResearchGate members who self-selected their featured publications and compared these publications with other publications listed in ResearchGate. Analysis: We analysed the distribution of featured publications in the ResearchGate members' whole publications in terms of their importance, recency, citation and source reputation. Results: Researchers prefer to feature publications in which they played important roles, those that were recently published, highly cited and published by reputable sources. Conclusion: By featuring their research, researchers can highlight their academic achievements and create the potential to contribute to the wider scientific community through the future application or discussion of their work. Instances of featured research published for a relatively long period in somewhat obscure journals, with few citations, show that there is a difference between how these papers are valued by the scientific community and the authors who featured them. The presented method may be applied to find latent sleeping beauties.