Scientists – Get Networked |
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Nick Oswald |
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Social networking is the latest buzz on the internet. You’ve heard about it, but what does it mean to you as a scientist? Well for one thing, it means that networking has never been easier. Here are five of the best social networking sites for scientists that are designed to help you make and maintain your professional contacts.
1. SciLink is a souped-up networking site that actually knows who a lot of your contacts will be before you even sign up. Uniquely, SciLink mines literature databases to build a network of professional relationships that you can slot into (and of course expand further) when you sign up. You can also find jobs, discussion, news etc on the site.
2. MyNetResearch is a powerful website for finding collaborators for your project. You set up your own account/profile and build a network of contacts as with the other social networks but MyNetResearch is designed to help you find people who work in the areas you are interested in (or interested in expanding into) and arrange collaborations with them.
3. The Nature Network. As you might expect, this is the grand-daddy of science social networks. Not only can you set up a contact network, but you can also browse niche-specific forums and groups, start your own blog, and much more.
4. LinkedIn is a site professional networking site for all professions. Unlike the science-specific networking sites,your LinkIn contact list can contain contacts who are not scientists, which is useful if you actually know people in the real world too 
and it has a more professional atmosphere than Facebook so people of all ages are more likely to join up.
5. Labmeeting primarily allows you to archive, track and share your literature. From your account you can search for papers of interest and upload the PDFs to your account for later retreival. You can also set up streams to keep you informed of the latest publications in your fields of interest, which you can then add to your archive. However, you can also set up a group area to share papers and talk about your interests, and to schedule events, such as lab meetings.
What social networking sites do you use?
Networking with LinkedIn and LabRoots
Networking For Scientists
4 Steps to Harness The Power of LinkedIn
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Jan
Hey Nick,
another resource for those interested in research management tools and academic social networks is Mendeley (www.mendeley.com, I’m one of the co-founders of Mendeley).
What is Mendeley?
Mendeley Desktop is a free cross-platform (Windows, Mac, Linux) software for managing, sharing and tagging research papers. You can back up and synchronize your library with Mendeley Web and access it from everywhere, either on Mendeley Web or Mendeley Desktop on a different PC, and share it with your social network on Mendeley Web. On Mendeley Web you can connect to like-minded academics and discover research trends and statistics.
In the future, we hope to build a large and open semantic database of research papers, sort of like a �Last.fm for research�.
We just launched into public beta and are also working with some of the people who co-founded Last.fm (www.last.fm) and Skype. Some more background information is available on our blog (www.mendeley.com/blog).
Take care
Jan
Rus Bishop
Hey Nick,
You forgot Scientist Solutions. With over 2 million page views and month, thousands of scientific discussions, and hundreds of protocols!
Varsh
Hi Nick.
That is a neat article. I use http://www.scientistsolutions.com pretty frequently. There are excellent protocols. They cover all life science disciplines. You could view the content without joining in. You could post questions and get them answered by fellow members and moderators at the site. I love to read the blogs and posts from other scientists.
Hope you will include this in your next article.
Varsh
Fraser
Nick
It is my opinion that scientists don’t want to social network. They don’t have time. They usually browse the web on problem solving personal missions. Whether it is a technical problem that must be solved, that paper they just can’t find, a reagent they need to find or compare with another similar product or the scientist needs to finds a collaborator, then they want to go to as few places as possible looking for their answers.
To get Life-Science relevant professional networking to forge new collaborations or to get help from my peers to solve particular problems in the lab the most efficient Life-Science web site is http://www.scientistsolutions.com.
The mission of the site is to act as a discussion board for Scientists to help other scientists. The most basic interaction is for a member to post his/her technical problem in one of the forums within the 38 Life-Science categories asking for help from other scientists around the globe who have experience in the field. members subscribe to the forums in which they are most interested and are alerted by email when someone has posted an item in their forum of interest. There are already 12,500 registered members globally who could read and reply with help.
The site is also full of useful protocols that members have uploaded or have provided links to the protocols posted elsewhere on the web. Members also post job listings that they see in the relevant forums and meeting announcements and can post new research ideas or look for a collaborator. I personally linked up with a great bioinformatician to help finish a motif search that I needed to complete to submit a manuscript. I started the collaboration and solved my problem all within 36 hours.
The blogs posted on the site also highlight the opinions of the global membership about their own research and the state of global Life-science research.
http://www.scientistsolutions.com probably has the most interactive traffic of all the sites listed above. By that I mean real posts from real scientists actually staying on the site, reading posts, exchanging ideas and forming real professional relationships directly online with one another and not just forming network exchanges with other people in their address book or 2nd or 3rd degree connections of their friends/colleagues address books.
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