Research Gate is a free social network and collaboration tool for scientists of all scientific disciplines.  It provides network applications such as semantic search (search by annotation), file sharing, sharing the publication database, forums, methodological discussions, and so on.  Members can create their own personal blog within the network.

 One of the distinguishing features of ResearchGate is its semantic search engine, which indexes both internal resources and the main public article databases, including PubMed, CiteSeer, arXiv, NASA Library.  This search engine was developed specifically for analyzing annotations of entire articles (and not just keywords), which, in theory, should increase the accuracy of the results.

 A similar mechanism for the search for semantic correspondence is used to offer new social connections to network participants.  After analyzing the information specified by the user in his profile, the site offers groups close to the interests of the user, other participants and literature.  Groups can be either open or closed.  Any user can always create a new group.  The group offers collaboration support tools, such as file sharing tools.  There are also tools for scheduling meetings and organizing surveys.  Several scientific organizations and conferences use ResearchGate as their primary way of communicating with participants.  The site also offers the possibility of creating private subgroups for large organizations that are open only to participants from the corresponding institution.

 The site also contains a bulletin board with a list of international vacancies for scientists.  The list can be sorted by keywords, position, region and country.  In 2009, ResearchGate made it possible to download recently published copyrighted articles.  These articles are automatically indexed by the site’s search engine.  Users can read and download articles for free.