The article presents a review on the functioning of the ResearchGate network and the growth of its popularity both from the literary data and from the experiments in the Google Scholar search engine. It describes a unique weekly monitoring experiments of downloads of Belgorod State University (Russia) scientists' publications by scientists from other countries (starting on 11.01.2015 through 20.12.2015), and it is shown that scientists from the United States (about 10,000 downloads in 2015) and China (about 6,000 downloads in 2015) are most interested in these publication
