⚡ Science and Research

Science and research platforms help scholars find academic papers, share their work, track citations, manage research profiles, and access preprints, patents, and data from a wide range of disciplines.

According to our data, science and research platforms are used on 0.1% of all websites.
78.1% of these sites use only one science and research platform, 14.9% use two, and 6.9% use three or more simultaneously.

⭐ Most Popular in 2026

The following chart shows the leading science and research platforms in 2026, based on market share.

The most popular is Google Scholar with an impressive share of 45.1%, followed by ResearchGate with 22.9% and arXiv with 17.8%.

Google Scholar 45.1%
ResearchGate 22.9%
arXiv 17.8%
Academia 16.5%
ORCID 15.4%
Scribd 7.1%
OSF 2.5%
Google Patents 2.2%
Semantic Scholar 1.5%

You can also drill down by country:

🚀 Country Highlights

Here is a list of platforms that are especially popular in certain countries.
Differences between global and country rankings are shown in parentheses.

arXiv is #2 in the United States ^(-1)

✨ Best Science and Research Platforms

Below is a more detailed list of 9 science and research platforms we detect, ranked by their market share.

Rank	Name	Market share
1	Google Scholar Mountain View, California, United States A free scholarly search engine that indexes articles, theses, books, abstracts, and court cases from academic publishers, professional societies, online repositories, and universities. Free	45.1%
2	ResearchGate Berlin, Germany A social networking site for scientists and researchers to list their publications, ask and answer questions, and interact with each other. Free	22.9%
3	arXiv Ithaca, New York, United States An open-access archive of nearly 2.4 million scholarly articles in physics, mathematics, computer science, quantitative biology, quantitative finance, statistics, electrical engineering and systems science, and economics. Free	17.8%
4	Academia San Francisco, California, United States A social networking platform for academics to share research papers. Free$499/year	16.5%
5	ORCID Bethesda, Maryland, United States An open, non-proprietary, transparent, community-based registry of unique identifiers for researchers and scholars. Free	15.4%
6	Scribd San Francisco, California, United States A digital document library and reading subscription service that provides access to millions of e-books, audiobooks, magazines, and user-uploaded documents. Free$9.99/month	7.1%
7	OSF Charlottesville, Virginia, United States An open source research platform that supports project management and collaboration, connects services across the research lifecycle, and archives data, materials, and other research objects for private use or public sharing. FreeOpen source	2.5%
8	Google Patents Mountain View, California, United States A search engine from Google that indexes patent publications from over 100 patent offices around the world. Free	2.2%
9	Semantic Scholar Seattle, Washington, United States An AI-powered search and discovery tool developed by the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence that helps researchers discover and understand scientific literature that's most relevant to their work. Free	1.5%

Data is based on the analysis of 3,313,119 websites.
Statistics were last calculated on February 25, 2026.
For details, see our methodology and disclaimer.