Scientific Researchers and Web 2.0: Social Not Working? forum: topic
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Social networks for scientists
Pedro Matos
Wednesday, 29 April 2009 13:03 UTC
Social networks for scientists are still quite recent and in the process growing. However the dispersion of users among these several networks and the poor willingness of scientists to embrace these services decrease the social power and usefulness of each network.
Here, I listed many of them:
- Nature Network
- ResearchGATE
- SciLink
- Epernicus
- LabRoots
- BiomedExperts
- Academia.edu
- Laboratree
- myExperiment
- Sci-mate
- LinkedIn (?)
And the more reference manager oriented ones:
So, what do you think about this topic? Do you use any of these or know other networks? Do you find it useful? What do you think a social network for scientists should provide to be successful?
Updated 26 May 2009 16:54 UTC
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Ian – I think email and the WWW (as it was then usually called) both had an explosive growth period after some time of being “speciality interests”. Email – for many years (as I’ve written boringly somewhere else on NN but can’t recall where so no link!) we at Nature did not have it though all our reviewers (and authors) did – so it was quite tortuous to communicate effectively by those means. We all really, really wanted email and it took us some years to persuade our employers of its benefits. It was sometime in the 90s I believe that we (the eds) finally obtained personal email accounts – and within weeks the previous phoning/faxing/dhl-ing (as we called it!)etc seemed redundant.
WWW the same – seeing various anniversary articles now makes me realise that for many people the web is 15 years old not 20. I think it was in the mid-to-late 1990s that it, like email, exploded into general use.
To my mind, the “next great thing” after these two invaluable (but greatly misused!) tools was RSS, and again to my mind, this is still a greatly underused and underappreciated tool. At a stroke, it makes one’s personal information management efficient and less stressful – the user is in charge of when he/she gets the information (unlike the stress effect of email).
Then of course, as you write, we had wikis, the next innovation. Again, as you say, there are some enthusiastic adopters who are using the technology in all kinds of core ways for their working (and no doubt personal) lives. Yet again, as you so aptly point out, it is very hard to get people to use them. We have various wikis at work that make people’s work lives easier in various ways, but it is jolly hard to encourage and get people to use them. (Constant problems with access control are one problem – I can’t tell you how many passwords and usernames I have for all these things, even though I am pretty organised about rationalising them – particularly where information is highly confidential, security and access issues can become quite sophisticated and a barrier to use.)
In the context of this discussion, I suppose my thinking is that many of these web-based (or IT-based) tools and services are very useful, but used by very small groups of people, for highly specific purposes. The vast majority are somewhere along the basic email-web-RSS-wiki continuum.
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blogging from my phone, excuse grammar and caps
maxine i got my email account in 1993 when i started at uni. but the computer system was not intuitive to negotiate, and also very alien to me. none of my friends used email significantly, and lecturers certainly didn’t expect us to submit electronically.
i checked email for the first time in 96 or 97. when i was a tech at Leicester we were online in a big way…97\98… it just exploded!
now, 10yrs later it’s archaic to expect anything done via chemical sticks and dead trees.
i agree with you, and i think its difficult to try and predict what will work and what won’t. i used to think ZIP drives and FTP were the coolest cutting edge things!
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Just came across this interesting and thorough blog post that addresses many of these issues:
Web 2.0 for Biologists – Are any of the current tools worth using?, from the blog of the executive editor of CSH Protocols, David Crotty.
It was written about a year ago but the majority of the problems stated still persist (not that I expected huge changes). -
Thanks Pedro. It’s an interesting and humorous read. It’s also long, and seeing as we can’t save posts, and I don’t have time to read it all now and/or start an off-line document, comments may come in stages.
You also have the paradox that those whose input would matter most to these sites are the least likely to contribute. I’m more interested in reading comments from a prominent researcher, or seeing her tags on papers that she finds interesting, rather than the less-informative opinions of a beginning graduate student. And yet those early graduate students are much more likely to be active on these sites because they’re more likely to have the time to spend there. Later in their careers, as they become more successful, their schedules get more crowded, and participation will wane just as it is becoming most valuable.
I’m not so sure I agree with the thesis behind this. The graduate student blogger might also be in the first responder cohort by virtue of age. Arguing that grad students have more time on their hands is a double edged sword: Yes, they clearly have “less to do” than a PI or senior postdoc, but by virtue of being a trainee they have very full schedules trying to keep up with the limited work load they do have. And certainly, by year 4 or 5, most (good) grad students are capably running a couple of projects, writing, job hunting and so on. I think it’s unfair to suggest they might be more inclined to blog because they have more “free time”.
Furthermore, what’s to suggest they’ll stop blogging/semantic webbing (a cloudy neologism for a cloudy morning) as they progress down their career path if they do follow the academic track. There’s no evidence to suggest this that I know of, and it certainly makes no obvious logical sense to me.
One argument I make for the “delayed” adoption of web2.0 is that those less likely to use it are generally the less web-savvy “older generation”, who don’t have time to learn new thing, or face a higher inertia barrier. As tempus fugits and the current grad student/postdoc/junior faculty bloggers and early adopters move along their careers there’ll be more and more senior staff and faculty using web2.0 (or whatever) by virtue of the fact that they always have.
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We have just been involved in running some focus group research with PhD researchers in the biomedical and environmental sciences. This involved 8 groups at 4 different universities across the UK (stratified by research intensity as assessed via the recent RAE)- 66 people in all.
The study was examining a range of information behaviours, including a few questions on the use of Web2.0 as part of day-to-day research practice. The findings still need to be fully analysed but early signs are echoing what others have found: Web2.0 may be used in what is perceived as a ‘non-work’ context but is not considered – at present – to be a ‘norm’ for discussion, discovery, sharing, validation or evaluation in a research context.
The very fact that I am relaying this in a dicussion forum demonstrates, of course, that not everyone holds this perception!
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Sorry, should have added that the participants were 18 months – 3 years into their PhD.
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Thanks, Ian and Allan – very interesting points, all. I agree with your comments on time management, Ian. One gets busy in different ways as one gets older (trading off doing expts for teaching and management, for example), and I think people do develop better time-management skills (especially if one also has a family to manage also, which most but not all young researchers don’t have to factor in).
I remember reading that David Crotty article at the time, Pedro, thanks for the re-link, but have forgotten most of it, though like Ian I recall not agreeing with all of it. (The fact that D.C. was recently cutting about Nature Network has nothing to do with that view, of course.) Seriously, D. C. has continued writing thought-provoking and stimulating (provocotive?) blog posts and other articles about web 2.0 and science in the intervening period.
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I used to use LinkedIn quite alot when I was working with alot of pharma/biotech industry scientists. Its more like a very corporate looking facebook for scientists who are more interested in networking, and can work very well – although I never really saw many academics on there.
I think we will only really see academic researchers posting on these types of networks (excluding LinkIn) because of all the legal issues surrounding biotech/pharma research. This is such a shame as there’s so much exciting and groundbreaking work being done in that particular industry at the moment that I’m sure would make for some very interesting reading and would certainly provide a base for some useful collaborations.
Another useful network, more for scientists who are interested in communicating their research is Connecting Science – its only just been set-up:
http://connectingscience.ning.com/
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Hi Dan – but why would we need another scientific network (the ‘connecting science’ you mention), given Pedro’s list that started this discussion? (This is rather along the lines of Chris from scimate who commented above encouraging people to join scimate.) What does connecting science do that these many other services don’t?
Personally I find LinkedIn tedious – it emails you with messages from contacts exhorting you to join their network, which you can’t make go away so you get repeats – I have emailed these contacts to ask them to stop it from sending me these messages and they have said they were not aware I was being sent them, and don’t know how to stop them. I haven’t had any useful experiences specific to it, though of course many people I know are on it as they are on other social networks, so I suppose some people are finding it helpful.
I prefer a service that lets me integrate my online activity.
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One of the least attractive aspects of Social Networking (eg, Linked-In) is that one is fed unrequested information just because one is too polite to refuse an ‘invitation’ to be someone’s ‘friend’ or ‘contact’. Web 2.0 does not have to be like this. We have designed Sci-Mate to actually reduce email. We’re using Web 2.0 software to make it easy for researchers to on one hand more easily promote and distribute the results of their research. Instead of spamming a social network, however, we’re developing powerful sorting, searching and browsing functions where other users who are genuinely interested in in that field can find specific knowledge, research tools, technology transfer, jobs, services.
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