⚡ 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.

They provide features such as advanced search and indexing across scholarly sources, citation tracking and metrics, author identifiers, document hosting and preprint distribution, personalized recommendations, alerts for new publications, and tools for collaboration and discussion.

According to our data, science and research platforms are used on 0.1% of all websites.
78.2% of these sites use only one science and research platform, 14.8% use two, and 6.9% use three or more simultaneously.

Statistics based on 3.3M+ analyzed websites. About this data

⭐ 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%, followed by ResearchGate with 22.9% and arXiv with 17.9%.

Google Scholar 45%
ResearchGate 22.9%
arXiv 17.9%
Academia 16.3%
ORCID 15.4%
Scribd 7.1%
OSF 2.5%
Google Patents 2.2%
Semantic Scholar 1.4%

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%
2	ResearchGate Berlin, Germany A social networking platform for scientists and researchers that enables them to share publications, collaborate with peers, and engage in academic discussions online. Free	22.9%
3	arXiv Ithaca, New York, United States An open-access repository operated by Cornell University that provides free access to scholarly articles across fields such as physics, mathematics, computer science, and economics. Free	17.9%
4	Academia San Francisco, California, United States A social networking platform for academics that enables users to share research papers, build professional profiles, and connect with other researchers worldwide. Free$$$	16.3%
5	ORCID Bethesda, Maryland, United States An open, non-proprietary registry that provides unique persistent identifiers for researchers and scholars, enabling them to distinguish their identity and connect their work across systems. 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 developed by the Center for Open Science that supports project management, collaboration, and data sharing across the research lifecycle. 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	1.4%

🗃️ About This Data

We evaluate the popularity of technologies based on the number of websites where we detect their usage.
Technologies without a detectable web footprint, and those we do not track, are not reflected in the calculated market share.
This report is based on the analysis of 3,371,595 websites.
We currently track the presence of 9 science and research platforms across the web.
Statistics were last calculated on April 20, 2026.
For more details, see our methodology and disclaimer.