Academic Social Networks

The president-elect Donald Trump is already famous for his use of twitter. He says that social networks helped him win without him needing to spend as much as the Clinton campaign on other advertising, both digital and traditional. “I think that social media has more power than the money they spent,” he told host Lesley Stahl, a hypothesis that he said he “proved” to a certain extent. Could this be true for scientists as well? Judith Houtman tested different social networks for us.


Social media like Facebook and Twitter have been around and very popular for a while now. Both have science-related applications. On Facebook, you can find invitation-only group pages for specific research fields. Twitter is a popular discussion forum, especially during conferences. However, neither of them are specifically designed for scientists.

Scientists Care About Social Networking

There have been a number of attempts to launch academic social networks. Until recently, they were unsuccessful. This was blamed on the wariness of scientists to share data, papers, and comments online [1]. The tide has changed, and now there are even three academic social networks competing with each other: ResearchGate, Academia.edu, and Mendeley.
A Nature reporter assessed the popularity of these media among 3500 scientists from different fields (Table 1). Many of the respondents knew of these social networks and had used at least some of them.
So, apparently it is generally accepted, and possibly even expected of you, to be a part of a social network.



Which One Should You Use?
With all academic networks, becoming a member is free and on each website you get a profile page with similar features (Table 2). Based on this, I could say that you may choose whichever webpage design you like better.
However, there are some differences to consider. Mendeley is originally a reference manager and is still used mostly for this purpose. Although networking is encouraged, it is not nearly as interactive as ResearchGate or Academia.edu. But many users of the two networks confessed that they signed up only in case someone wanted to contact them, rather than for the purpose of active networking themselves. Another interesting fact is that social scientists are more fond of Academia.edu while life scientists focus rather on ResearchGate [1]. This also seems to hold true for the Charité scientists (Table 1).
I created a profile with all three of the networks, and browsed around for about a month to get to know them. I found myself more engaged in the ResearchGate community, which in part was due to the regular email updates. Upon registration, and any time after, you can also decide on not receiving these updates, or receiving them less frequently if they annoy you.
ResearchGate also sends out scientific questions from members to other members based on the topic selected as their interest. It works; those who ask usually receive several in-depth answers within a couple of days!
Based on the above-mentioned facts and experience, I decided to keep my profile on ResearchGate. I invite you to do the same (or get your own impression by checking them out for yourself).Take part in interesting scientific discussions, stay up to date on relevant papers, and be available for networking!

[1] R. van Noorden, Nature, 2014

by Judith Houtman, PhD Student AG Heppner
This article originally appeared December 2014 in Volume 07,  Issue 4