Here is something about the paper on Researchgate and its number of reads.
The structure of RG is somewhat chaotic and unclear. What is what and where is not easy to comprehend (profiles, publications, projects, labs…).
On the landing page of the paper there are only parts of the public information about it, the numbers are added up for all publications of the author. Here is the path to get a little bit deeper.
Click on the name, go to „Projects“, scroll down and click on „show all“.
At this point it is notable that Rossi is member of quite a lot „projects“, where many of them seem to be about internal RG referencing, recommendations and „achievements“. I don’t know exactly how, but I think this is part of the way he got so many views on his paper. For example the project „Technical Science, Goal: 1-Sharing & recommending publications“.
Somewhere down the list of projects there is „E-Cat Project“, note that there is not much really going on, 1,162 Reads 4 Updates 76 Followers, click on view.
On the project page scroll down, the last entry is the paper. Here we can see the current number of reads and recommendations. The recommendations give us a pop-up with some names. Unfortunately the whole list is only for members of RG. The number of recommendations is way smaller than what „Prof“ tells us regularly, it’s even smaller than the sum of all recommendations for all publications on the E-Cat project page. It’s either a made up number, or it is from the author’s statistics, taking into account some numbers we can’t see or that are not apparent.
Now click on the title and go back to where we started. Scroll down to the end of the paper, note that despite the awe inspiring number of reads, the paper has been cited zero times, „ResearchGate has not been able to resolve any citations for this publication“.
The also oftentimes cited „Research Interest Score“ number by "Prof" cannot be found anywhere on the public side of RG. Maybe it’s only for members or maybe even only for the author on his statistics page. There also seems to exist a comments section for the paper, which is also either only for members or the author.