Crawling ResearchGate.net to Measure Student/Supervisor Collaboration

ResearchGate.net is an academic social network that aims to facilitate knowledge sharing and academic collaboration through publication upload and download, questions and answers, and other mechanisms. In this paper we have collected data about the collaboration of Canadian Computer Science researchers, first through a quantitative exploration of student/supervisor collaboration on joint publications, and second, through a quantitative exploration of other collaboration mechanisms. Our results indicate that researchgate.net does indeed facilitate collaboration, but also finds some interesting properties of the available facilities of the social network platform.