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I read an interesting article in FUMSI the other day entitled Social Networking: A Research Tool, by Amelia Kassel. Kassel looks at ways in which online social networks can be used for research (in this instance, mainly for business research), but she also mentions BiomedExperts, a literature-based social networking platform for the life-science research community.
Then I read about a study which looks at the increasing penetration of networking in the STM publishing sector. It mentions ACS Network, a professional networking tool for the global chemistry community, hosted by the American Chemical Society.
The best known social networking sites are probably MySpace, Facebook, Bebo, LinkedIn and Ecademy, but there’s also a growing number of services aimed at networking in academia.
In the Engineering and Mathematics @ City blog, Catherine Davies has written helpful descriptions of most of them, including Nature Network, 2collab (discussed here in spineless? in July), academia.edu, ResearcherID, MyNetResearch, ResearchGate, Academici, allResearchers, and iBreadcrumbs. In addition, there’s Emerald InTouch.
Are any of you currently using a social network for your academic work/research? It would be interesting to hear about practical examples, so why not post a comment, below?
If you’re not sure what all this social networking stuff is about, there’s a basic introduction to social networking at About.com or a What are social networking services? at digizen, or an Internet MiniGuide.
Roddy MacLeod
Senior Subject Librarian
6 October 2008 at 2:18 pm |
[...] Thanks to Roddy MacLeod @ Heriot Watt who helpfully supplied the majority of links above on a discussion list, and who has since written more on the Heriot-Watt spineless? blog. [...]
24 October 2008 at 7:58 am |
Thanks Roddy for this overview! At the University of Zurich some Researcher are using our Learning Management Platform for Collaboration. Other people told me, that they don’t need such a platform, because they are such a small community, that they know each other.
Nevertheless I see the potential of social software in research but I think that there is a need of discipline specific platforms for reducing the complexity and meed the discipline specific needs.
24 October 2008 at 8:09 am |
Hi Matthias,
I think we’re seeing some subject networks appear. There’s the ACS Network which I mention above, and also IET Discover. There’s eFunda, which has some features of a social network, and there’s even SciTechNet(sm) which is devoted to describing and documenting online social networking services in the Sciences and Technology http://scitechnet.blogspot.com/
Roddy
3 November 2008 at 5:37 pm |
Hi Roddy,
I have checked two of these networks and there are new ones popping up. I think it is quite interesting to see which one will make it. I checked Nature Network and ResearchGate. I prefer the latter especially since they have combined web 2.0 with advanced searches lately.
4 November 2008 at 10:15 am |
Hi Alexandra,
Yes, I wonder if all of these sites will still exist in a year or two.
Roddy
18 December 2008 at 2:16 am |
[...] on social networking in academia A while back I wrote in this blog about social networking in academia, and a bit later I mentioned IET Discover, an example of a well-supported network. There’s [...]
12 January 2009 at 1:55 pm |
[...] networked student I’ve blogged previously about social networking in academia, with an update, but how are students actually using various social networks? The following [...]