1 ResearchGate Articles: Age, Discipline, Audience Size and Impact 1 Mike Thelwall and Kayvan Kousha Statistical Cybermetrics Research Group, University of Wolverhampton. The large multidisciplinary academic social web site ResearchGate aims to help academics to connect with each other and to publicise their work. Despite its popularity, little is known about the age and discipline of the articles uploaded and viewed in the site and whether publication statistics from the site could be useful impact indicators. In response, this article assesses samples of ResearchGate articles uploaded at specific dates, comparing their views in the site to their Mendeley readers and Scopus-indexed citations. This analysis shows that ResearchGate is dominated by recent articles, which attract about three times as many views as older articles. ResearchGate has uneven coverage of scholarship, with the arts and humanities, health professions, and decision sciences poorly represented and some fields receiving twice as many views per article as others. View counts for uploaded articles have low to moderate positive correlations with both Scopus citations and Mendeley readers, which is consistent with them tending to reflect a wider audience than Scopus-publishing scholars. Hence, for articles uploaded to the site, view counts may give a genuinely new audience indicator. Introduction Researchers can join many different websites in order to publicise their research. A new paper ŵight ďe puďlished iŶ the jourŶal puďlishers ǁeďsite aŶd ŵay be free to anyone if the journal is gold Open Access (OA) (i.e., all of its articles are open access), or the author may pay the journal an OA fee. Alternatively, or in addition, the author may self-archive a preprint in a subject or institutional repository (Swan & Brown, 2005), on their own website (Kousha & Thelwall, 2014) or in an academic social web site like ResearchGate or Academia.edu. Nevertheless, whichever strategies are chosen, there is a trade-off between the time needed to upload information and the benefits of the extra publicity (Ward, Bejarano, & Dudás, 2015). In this context it is important to assess the benefits of each site in order to allow rational choices about which, if any, to use. There is some research about the benefits of online publicity for academic articles. OA articles tend to be more cited (e.g., Wang, Liu, Mao, & Fang, 2015) but this could be because they tend to be better rather than because they are easier to access (Davis, 2011), and there is no evidence that is specific to articles uploaded to academic social web sites. There is also evidence that citations and usage metrics from digital libraries or subject repositories, such as views or downloads of articles, correlate with each other, suggesting that usage metrics partially reflect scholarly impact (e.g., Kurtz et al., 2005; Brody, et al., 2006; Duy & Vaughan, 2006). This seems likely to be also true for articles in academic social web sites but has not been tested. In addition to the above knowledge gaps, no investigation has assessed the disciplinary or age coverage of ResearchGate to characterise typical articles uploaded and to assess whether there are different levels of interest in them. This is an important omission 1 This is a preprint of an article to be published in the Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology © copyright 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.