Sharing gray academic literature with ResearchGate DOIs: Increased discoverability but inaccurate metadata
Enrique Orduña-Malea
Orcid profile 
Article Category: Research Papers
Published Online: Jul 10, 2025
Received: Mar 31, 2025
Accepted: Jun 19, 2025
DOI: https://doi.org/10.2478/jdis-2025-0039
Keywords
© 2025 Enrique Orduña-Malea, published by Sciendo
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Purpose
To describe the characteristics of research outputs using persistent identifiers generated by ResearchGate to gain insight into what publications are shared and disseminated through this functionality, revealing their academic and non-academic impact.
Design/methodology/approach
A total of 1,092,934 RG-DOIs were collected, using the DataCite API, along with bibliographic metadata for the associated registered output (RG-DOI publications). The subsequent analysis evaluated the publication date, document type, and language. These values were crossreferenced against the full text of a random sample of 666 records to verify accuracy.
Findings
RG-DOIs have served primarily to identify and make accessible scholarly gray literature, including posters, presentations, conference papers, and theses, with notable emphasis on publications in Spanish and Portuguese. Around 41,000 citations from Web of Science indexed publications to RG publications are evidence of their infrequent but perceptible use in scholarly discourse. The declining number of registrations of RG-DOIs observed may indicate a shift in researcher preferences to alternative platforms for DOI generation.
Research limitations
The study uncovered substantial inconsistencies in DataCite metadata, which can be attributed to the automated DOI registration process and internal changes in the available document types on ResearchGate.
Practical implications
The study encountered challenges in conducting a quantitative analysis due to inconsistencies in the metadata. These have potential implications for researchers, practitioners, and librarians relying on RG-DOIs to conduct bibliometric or bibliographic analysis.
Originality/value
This study is the first comprehensive analysis of RG-DOIs and, as such, provides a unique perspective into academic gray literature. It also sheds light on the quality of ResearchGate data transmitted to DataCite when registering DOIs.