Round of Social Media for Scientists
David Bradley
Wednesday, 05 November 2008 15:54 UTC
I hope this item on social media for scientists is pertinent to attendees.
There seem to be so many networks now and the numbers are growing. If I’ve overlooked any please let me know.
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Replies
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That’s an amazingly useful post, David, and must have been a lot of work to put that list of al those sites together.
While I can see that some of these sites fulfil a useful purpose (eg Mendeley, which I have not tried but heard about it at Science Blogging08 and read Martin Fenner’s post about it), some of them seem to be clones of each other, ie sites for scientists to share news, gossip, information. It is hard to see them all enduring. Maybe I’m missing something. -
ScienceOnline’09 will have a session on social networks for scientists: Social networking for scientists, moderated by Cameron Neylon and Deepak Singh. I’m looking forward to this session.
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Yes, you’re right Maxine, some of them are clones. That’s probably to be expected, once someone comes up with a good idea, others follow, hoping to stake their claim. I would liked to have had more time to review each one in detail and was hoping that by posting here, others would chip in with their thoughts on the sites with which they are familiar.
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This is a very useful list. But in addition to Maxine’s concerns I am also hesitant to recreate the same network all over again on different sites.
In the end, there surely will be a concentration process for all those sites and only a few will survive. There likely will be a self-accumulating user base for the most successful ones, as the more users there are the more sense they make. For a perspective, SciLink claims about 44,000 users, SocialMD only 3100. On the other hand, LinkedIn says they have 30 Million users, facebook more than 120 Million, which is of course across all of society.
But why social networking only for scientists, can’t this all happening within places such as facebook or LinkedIn? There is a difference in style between the latter two, but certainly scientists are on both and there are science groups as well. Or are there applications in these other networking sites really specific to scientists? Can you share lab books and wikis?
And then of course there also places like this here which offers a slightly different take and has a large potential to grow…
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Interesting thoughts Joerg…as with the general social media sites, there is this major problem of spreading oneself too thin.
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Science Careers (Social Networking Grows Up) had an article on the topic in late October. They talk about a few social networking sites for scientists, but somehow fail to mention Nature Network. The article also mentions social networking sites set up by universities, including ResearchConnect (University of Manchester) and Small Worlds (University of Leicester). I didn’t know about this (unless you count the Facebook organisation by universities), but it looks like a good idea.
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See also the NMR forum on NN for a discussion about one of these resources called ResearchGate (an unfortunate title, given the -gate suffix is in broad general use to indicate scandal or corruption?!).
One of the people at FriendFeed made a point that he signs up to all these sites but does not do anything there, just to optimise Google searches for his name. I don’t know how or if that works. See here for FF discussion.
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It is nice to have all these social networking sites for scientists to choose from, but we need more dicussions what we want from these sites and what differentiates them. That’s why I’m looking forward to the panel discussion at ScienceOnline’09. FriendFeed is another good place to talk about this.
But it seems odd to talk about social networking sites here at Nature Network, as some of these sites are seen as competitors. A discussion of what we want or don’t want from Nature Network probably makes more sense. And for that we have the What’s wrong and What’s next forum.
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That’s a neat irony that Lewis Carroll would have liked, Martin. To discuss social networks online, you have to be on a social network (eg NN, FF etc). I agree there is no substitute for physical meetings on occasion, but sadly not all social networkers can get to one given meeting – whereas, in principle, they could all do so pretty easily on one online network. I think that is where we came in. ;-)
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I’ve posted a follow-up item on scientists socializing online
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