• « Our Librarian Bodies. Our Librarian Selves. Presentation = Speech + Slides »

• Social networking with a brain: a critical review of academic sites

  by Kim Leeder

  December 10, 2008
   Print This Post

  Social net­work­ing may have started out as a way for stu­dents to keep track of their friends, but it has expanded in just about every direc­tion. These days, you can find at least one related social net­work­ing site on just about any gen­eral topic, includ­ing music, pho­tog­ra­phy, tele­vi­sion, books, shop­ping, and book­mark­ing. But it isn’t all fun games. Job sites like Mon­ster and LinkedIn began the evo­lu­tion from social net­work­ing to pro­fes­sional net­work­ing, and acad­e­mia has joined the fray as a num­ber of net­work­ing sites specif­i­cally for aca­d­e­mics have popped up in recent years. Now we can add “research” to the list above.

  The impe­tus for this blog post was an email that has been mak­ing the rounds, orig­i­nat­ing from Dr. Richard Price of Oxford Uni­ver­sity, that reads as follows:

  I recently fin­ished my Ph.D on the phi­los­o­phy of per­cep­tion from Oxford. With a team of peo­ple from Stan­ford and Cam­bridge, I’ve just launched a web­site, www​.acad​e​mia​.edu, which does two things:

  - It shows aca­d­e­mics around the world struc­tured in a ‘tree’ for­mat, dis­played accord­ing to their depart­men­tal and insti­tu­tional affil­i­a­tions.
   – It enables aca­d­e­mics to see news on the lat­est research in their area — the lat­est peo­ple, papers and talks.

  We are hop­ing that Acad​e​mia​.edu will even­tu­ally list every aca­d­e­mic in the world — Fac­ulty Mem­bers, Post-Docs, Grad­u­ate Stu­dents, and Inde­pen­dent Researchers. Aca­d­e­mics can add their depart­ments, and them­selves, to the tree by click­ing on the boxes.

  The mes­sage con­cludes with the names of a few nota­bles who have joined (or been added) to the site, and a request to assist Dr. Price and friends in their efforts by fur­ther cir­cu­lat­ing the announcement.

  Call me a sucker, but I got that mes­sage and imme­di­ately joined up, for­warded it to my col­leagues, and started envi­sion­ing the pos­si­bil­i­ties. What intrigues me is Academia.edu’s com­bi­na­tion of a pro­fes­sional net­work­ing site with a dig­i­tal repos­i­tory. Could this take the place of our nascent insti­tu­tional repos­i­tory or save my fel­low librar­i­ans from hav­ing to put together an insti­tu­tional bib­li­og­ra­phy each year?

  

  A screen shot of Academia.edu’s homepage.

  The networking-repository hybrid model was new to me, though I learned later that Acad​e​mia​.edu is not the first to do this. Nor is it the only vir­tual plat­form where researchers can cre­ate a pro­file and search for oth­ers with sim­i­lar research inter­ests. A lot of peo­ple in acad­e­mia already use Face­book and LinkedIn to con­nect with their col­leagues and friends, but Acad​e​mia​.edu and its com­peti­tors are dif­fer­ent because they were specif­i­cally cre­ated to serve the needs of aca­d­e­mics, in terms of research, pro­fes­sional net­work­ing, list­ing cita­tions, and file shar­ing. Try some of those activ­i­ties on Face­book, and you’ll soon agree that it falls far short of an academic’s net­work­ing needs.

  Here’s an overview of the major aca­d­e­mic net­work­ing sites and their fea­tures (if you know of oth­ers I over­looked, please com­ment below). All allow you to cre­ate a pro­file and search for other aca­d­e­mics by research inter­est, so I’ve omit­ted those fea­tures in the table.

  

  In addi­tion to the char­ac­ter­is­tics above, these are the qual­i­ties that make each site unique.

  • Acad​e​mia​.edu: Net­work­ing for aca­d­e­mics in all fields. Offers unique visual for­mat with orga­ni­za­tion by insti­tu­tion. Fea­tures Face­book Con­nect.
  • BibApp: Must be hosted on your server for campus-specific orga­ni­za­tion of fac­ulty experts and research. Func­tions more like a cat­a­log of fac­ulty than a net­work­ing site, but could be used either way.
  • Eper­ni­cus: Net­work­ing tar­geted for sci­en­tists. Fea­tures “BenchQs,” which is like Yahoo! Answers for science.
  • Grad­u­ate Junc­tion: Net­work­ing for grad­u­ate stu­dents that pro­fesses to be less intim­i­dat­ing than pro­fes­sional sites. Offers a con­fer­ence diary & job listings.
  • Lab­meet­ing: Net­work­ing for sci­en­tists in the bio­med­ical and related sci­ences. Offers fea­tures to assist in orga­niz­ing and shar­ing infor­ma­tion in lab set­tings. Also includes strong pri­vacy protection.
  • Prone­tos: Net­work­ing for aca­d­e­mics in all fields. Orga­ni­za­tion by dis­ci­pline, and offers dis­cus­sion forums for each discipline.

  I’m going to use the remain­der of this post to crit­i­cally review these aca­d­e­mic net­work­ing sites, look­ing at the ben­e­fits, lim­i­ta­tions, and pos­si­ble future outlook.

  The Good

  There are two major ben­e­fits offered by par­tic­i­pa­tion in most of the sites I’m looked at, espe­cially Acad​e​mia​.edu and Pronetos:

  1. The abil­ity to locate other schol­ars with sim­i­lar research interests.
  2. The power to upload papers, arti­cles, and even books to con­tribute to a world­wide dig­i­tal repository.

  As far as #1, the net­work­ing aspect goes, it would be nat­ural to ask why any of these sites are an improve­ment over the ubiq­ui­tous Face­book. Who needs another social net­work, for good­ness sake? Vivek Murthy, one of the founders of Eper­ni­cus, addressed the ques­tion in a post on the Eper­ni­cus blog: “Mikhail and I started Eper­ni­cus because we real­ized that the social net­works to which we belonged weren’t able to serve our needs as sci­en­tists. The pro­files didn’t cap­ture what was impor­tant to sci­en­tists. And equally as impor­tant, we couldn’t use these net­works to help us find exper­tise in real world sci­en­tific net­works.” If they had a ques­tion or issue unique to their research that no one they knew per­son­ally could address, they wanted a way to find oth­ers out there who might know more. This is not what Face­book was built for.

  In the­ory, the oppor­tu­nity to share research inter­ests and con­nect with other schol­ars sounds idyl­lic. Finally, the chance to find out who’s walk­ing the same path and read­ing the same arti­cles. It’s like eHar­mony for the brain instead of the heart. If there is a need and a demand for such a thing, it could really take off.

  Per­son­ally, I get more excited about #2, the dig­i­tal repos­i­tory side of this project. The sites that actu­ally host files, espe­cially Acad​e​mia​.edu and Prone­tos, are con­tribut­ing to the open access move­ment in ways they may not even real­ize. Although those of us in libraries already know that fac­ulty usu­ally don’t want to take the addi­tional time to post their papers to our repos­i­to­ries, these two sites could be dif­fer­ent because (a) they’re eas­ier to use than any library repos­i­tory I’ve ever seen, (b) they’re pret­tier, and © they make it clear that the papers uploaded will be shared with oth­ers instead of stored in a dusty server room, never to be heard from again.

  The Bad

  First, any social net­work­ing site, whether per­sonal or pro­fes­sional, is only as good as its mem­ber­ship. With that in mind, I would say that all of these sites have a long way to go in solic­it­ing mem­bers. Acad​e​mia​.edu appears to be the largest, at about 20,000, but this is still a small per­cent­age of aca­d­e­mics world­wide. Grad­u­ate­Junc­tion may have the great­est poten­tial in this arena due to its spe­cific tar­get audi­ence (grad­u­ate stu­dents) and the fact that it boasts more “use­ful” (job and con­fer­ence) fea­tures than the other sites in this review.

  Sec­ond, although I ini­tially found it enter­tain­ing to search for oth­ers with sim­i­lar research inter­ests to mine, once I found a few I real­ized that I just didn’t know what to do with them. I could add them as con­tacts and review their pub­li­ca­tions. What then? If I were extremely moti­vated per­haps I would email them and say a few words in our unique research inter­est lan­guage (“speak­ing geek,” I think they call it). But how often would such con­tact lead to some­thing con­struc­tive? The more I searched, the more skep­ti­cal I became.

  Third, aca­d­e­mic net­work­ing sites are fac­ing big chal­lenges in find­ing an effec­tive way to ensure that only legit­i­mate aca­d­e­mics par­tic­i­pate. The UK Times Higher Edu­ca­tion expressed con­cern about Acad​e​mia​.edu because “any­one can pass them­selves off as an academic…and schol­ars could be mis­led into putting their details on it because it occu­pies the generic top-level domain ‘.edu,’ which is nor­mally reserved for uni­ver­si­ties.” On the other hand, some sites are so care­ful to screen mem­bers that they seem almost impos­si­ble to join. Despite repeated attempts, I was unable to join Lab­meet­ing or Prone­tos due to their screen­ing stan­dards. Prone­tos sent me an acti­va­tion mes­sage that some­how dis­ap­peared into cyber­space (and no, it wasn’t in my spam folder), while Lab­meet­ing did not rec­og­nize my uni­ver­sity email address as being from a legit­i­mate aca­d­e­mic domain (my uni­ver­sity pres­i­dent would take issue with that!).

  The Ugly

  All in all, social net­works of any vari­ety are a curi­ous trade­off. How much time are you will­ing to put into them in order to expand your web of con­nec­tions? In writ­ing this blog post, I spent 8 – 10 hours crawl­ing around on the var­i­ous sites men­tioned here, cre­at­ing pro­files, explor­ing group and research inter­ests, check­ing to see if I knew any­one (or wanted to know any­one) on any of the sites. I found many of the sites appeal­ing at first, and enjoyed some of my wan­der­ings. But now that I’ve had some expo­sure to these plat­forms, return­ing to Face­book feels kind of like going home. True, I can’t search for other schol­ars based on my research inter­ests. But con­sid­er­ing how many other avenues I have to find them — from pub­li­ca­tions to blogs to con­fer­ences — do I really need a new one?

  As Jef­frey R. Young noted in “New Social Net­work Hopes to Cat­a­log All Researchers and Their Inter­ests,“an arti­cle in the Sep­tem­ber 16 issue of the Chron­i­cle of Higher Edu­ca­tion, “It’s too soon to tell whether any of these sites will catch on, and it seems that the ser­vices will only become valu­able if a crit­i­cal mass of researchers join in. The final win­ner may be Face­book itself.” So, are these new-kid-on-the-block aca­d­e­mic net­work­ing sites worth your time? Based upon my admit­tedly lim­ited expe­ri­ence on these sites, prob­a­bly not. But if you have some free time, go for it. Cre­ate your pro­file and see who else is out there. You might get lucky.

  -

  Many thanks to Brett Bon­field and Ellie Dworak for tak­ing the time to offer feed­back on the draft of this post, and to Brett for his cod­ing kind­nesses.
  

  You might also be inter­ested in:

  • Why We Should Adopt ALA­Con­nect: A brief review and rumi­na­tion on ALA’s new online community
  • Will the Real Emily Please Stand Up
  • Step­ping on Toes: The Del­i­cate Art of Talk­ing to Fac­ulty about Ques­tion­able Assignments
  • In Praise of the Inter­net: Shift­ing Focus and Engag­ing Crit­i­cal Think­ing Skills
  • Pro-Con-ference
  Tags: academia, academia.edu, academis, faculty, networking, social networking

  RSS feed for comments on this post

  Leave a comment | Trackback
• « Our Librarian Bodies. Our Librarian Selves. Presentation = Speech + Slides »

12 Comments

• Derik Badman says:

  December 10, 2008 at 9:40 am

  I’m inter­ested to see you men­tion Face­book Con­nect in con­nec­tion to Acad​e​mia​.edu, though I don’t see a Face­book login option on the site.

  The inclu­sion of FB Con­nect might address the issue with “I’ve found col­leagues, now what?” issue which was my first response after sign­ing up for the site. If I could find those col­leagues and then eas­ily (ie auto­mat­i­cally) friend them in FB, then the social aspect could be increased.

  See­ing arti­cles that have been put into the archive in Acad​e​mia​.edu then appear in my FB news feed would also be a by-product that might encour­age archiv­ing. That’s a good way to pro­mote your work to colleagues.

  These cross-site options (also see Google’s Friend Con­nect, released for pub­lic use the same day as FB Con­nect) are where the real action will be hap­pen­ing. By con­nec­tion our niche net­works to the greater net­works, we can, hope­fully, have the best of both worlds. I’m excited by these options because I’ve reached the over­load point on social net­works, logins, sep­a­rate friends, and all that.

  The dan­ger, of course, being the fur­ther entrench­ment of power by FB and/or Google (though in Google’s defense their are at least using open stan­dards like OpenID and OAuth).

  Reply
• Jan says:

  December 10, 2008 at 4:26 pm

  Dear Kim,

  thanks for this post. I would like to add Mende­ley (www​.mende​ley​.com, I’m a co-founder). Mende­ley is two things: Free aca­d­e­mic desk­top soft­ware (avail­able for Win­dows, Mac and Linux) for man­ag­ing & shar­ing research papers, and a web­site where you can back up and access your research papers, dis­cover research trends, and con­nect to like-minded researchers. Mende­ley went into pub­lic beta in August 2008 and is funded by for­mer key per­son­nel from Last​.fm, Skype, and aca­d­e­mics at Cam­bridge and Johns Hop­kins University.

  Our vision is to become a “Last​.fm for Research”. Along these lines, I fully agree with you that the com­bi­na­tion of social net­work for sci­en­tists and dig­i­tal repos­i­tory offers a lot of poten­tial. A short demo about what we envi­sion: http://​uk​.youtube​.com/​w​a​t​c​h​?​v​=​U​z​J​b​r​A​9​E​Y7A

  I hope you find that inter­est­ing. If you want, you can add fur­ther ideas or com­ments in our feed­back forum: htto://feedback.mendeley.com.

  Thanks
  Jan

  Reply
• Emily Ford says:

  December 11, 2008 at 9:04 pm

  I’m hav­ing trou­ble keep­ing up with social net­work­ing sites. Recently I deleted my Myspace account, my Friend­ster account, and I should prob­a­bly go delete my Tribe account if I can remem­ber what the login is.

  While I know that new sites with a pro­fes­sional twist are sup­posed to help in our world, I fear that the same thing will hap­pen with these sites. One will take over (like Face­book has) prob­a­bly because it has the most user-centered interface.

  Plus, when we get into the world of web-hosted sys­tems that are not our own (on our institution’s server) for schol­arly com­mu­ni­ca­tion, repos­i­to­ries, etc, we run into copy­right and intel­lec­tual prop­erty issues. Did you look into what these two sites have when it comes to poli­cies? Just how aware will researchers and aca­d­e­mi­cians who use such sites be when it comes to these issues?

  I remain skeptical…

  Reply
• Maxine says:

  December 14, 2008 at 4:59 am

  You might also like to have a look at Nature Net­work, the plat­form of Nature Pub­lish­ing Group (dis­claimer: I work for the same com­pany as an edi­tor at the jour­nal Nature, but do not work for Nature Net­work). This is a social web­site that lets sci­en­tists (or any­one, but the accent is on sci­ence) join for free and cre­ate a pro­file of their pub­li­ca­tions and other infor­mal mate­r­ial. Peo­ple can form groups and there are about 50 – 100 sci­en­tists who blog there. There are events list­ings, and other aspects. http://​net​work​.nature​.com.

  Reply
• Karen Downing says:

  December 17, 2008 at 1:02 pm

  Hi Kim,
  Nice post! This is a bit of a dif­fer­ent ani­mal, but there are also fee-based aca­d­e­mic net­work­ing sites such as COS (Com­mu­nity of Sci­ence). Pro­Quest bought COS & CSA and has big plans to inte­grate it’s Exper­tise data­base (where schol­ars load their own pro­files, and where Pro­Quest will be load­ing researched pro­files) with it’s arti­cle indices, fund­ing oppor­tu­ni­ties, and con­fer­ence calls all into one suite of prod­ucts. So one could find col­lab­o­ra­tors online, see what they have pub­lished (or see who is pub­lish­ing in an area and then visit their pro­file), and then find fund­ing oppor­tu­ni­ties and calls for papers all in one search.

  Reply
• Social Networks and Academia…12.24.08 « The Proverbial Lone Wolf Librarian’s Weblog says:

  December 24, 2008 at 9:39 am

  […] 24 12 2008 Here is an excerpt from In The Library With a Lead Pipe [http://​inthe​li​brary​with​the​lead​pipe​.org/​2​0​0​8​/​s​o​c​i​a​l​-​n​e​t​w​o​r​k​i​n​g​-​w​i​t​h​-​a​-​b​r​a​i​n​-​a​-​c​r​i​t​i​c​a​l​-​r​e​v​i​e​w​-​o​f​-​a​cad…] enti­tled “Social Net­work­ing With A Brain…” but read the whole post for an […]

  Reply
• Chris Blanchard CEO, Pronetos, Inc. says:

  December 26, 2008 at 2:55 pm

  Kim: Thanks for blog­ging about our site, Prone­tos. We hope it is a use­ful addi­tion to the schol­arly world.

  We cre­ated the site because we heard plenty of schol­ars say that they did not want to use FB and MySpace because they weren’t pro­fes­sional ori­ented. So we cre­ated a site that is exclu­sive to aca­d­e­mics. We think it is a great way for peo­ple to cre­ate their own easy to main­tain home page on the web.

  It is also sorted by com­mu­nity so that you can find oth­ers in your field. In our opin­ion FB and MySpace are fairly dif­fi­cult to nav­i­gate to find other peo­ple with like interests.

  The site is still being built out and we are adding new com­mu­ni­ca­tion tools (improv­ing the e-mail) and adding more secu­rity mea­sures like CAPTCHA.

  I also want to quickly address the com­ment made by Emily Ford. The Prone­tos social net­work­ing or com­mu­nity site is designed for researchers and schol­ars to share grey lit­er­a­ture. We clearly state on our home page that all the con­tent on the site is cov­ered under the Cre­ative Com­mons Attri­bu­tion 3.0 license. So, author should not post items there where they do not con­trol the U.S. Copy­right. Our terms of use pol­icy at the site also states that very clearly.

  We are also beta test­ing an OAI-PMH com­pli­ant repos­i­tory called the Global Research Archive. That site serves as a tra­di­tional repos­i­tory which serves all dis­ci­plines. We worked very closely with the devel­op­ers of that soft­ware to insure that we had the most com­plete set of poli­cies of any repos­i­tory host out there. There are few repos­i­to­ries listed in Open DOAR that have their poli­cies as well artic­u­lated as does the Global Research Archive.

  For schol­ars we know that con­tent is cur­rency, thus we take the own­er­ship issue very seri­ously. We are also firmly com­mit­ted to the Open Access and Open Source com­mu­ni­ties. So, we hope that schol­ars the world around who see eye-to-eye on these issues will help sup­port us.

  As always, we are easy to get in touch with and we always strive to be respon­sive to the needs of the com­mu­ni­ties we serve.

  Thanks again for post­ing about us!

  Reply
• ismael says:

  December 31, 2008 at 12:52 pm

  Hi,

  Thanks for the post: this is some­thing I’ve also been think­ing about in the last months.

  Just wanted to share my own list, now updated with the ref­er­ences of yours, Jan and Maxine.

  Best,

  i.

  Reply
• ismael says:

  December 31, 2008 at 12:53 pm

  Ooops, my list:

  http://​ict​l​ogy​.net/​w​i​k​i​/​i​n​d​e​x​.​p​h​p​?​t​i​t​l​e​=​S​o​c​i​a​l​_​N​e​t​w​o​r​k​i​n​g​_​S​i​t​e​s​_​f​o​r​_​S​c​i​e​n​t​i​sts

  Reply
• Thomas says:

  January 2, 2009 at 6:50 am

  I have recently stum­bled upon http://​www​.ulurn​.com
  Judg­ing by the ver­sion num­ber it seems that it is in early stages but hav­ing a short play with it really seems a one stop shop for the whole aca­d­e­mic journey.

  Though it is not 100% aca­d­e­mic tar­geted it still has a ded­i­cated sec­tion to that. It even acts as a pub­li­ca­tion repos­i­tory. Will watch it with interest.

  Reply
• Un avis sur les réseaux sociaux académiques | MEDIATHEQUE2010.FR - PROSPECTIVES says:

  February 16, 2009 at 11:24 am

  […] Kim Leeder, après avoir dressé un panorama des réseaux soci­aux dédiés aux uni­ver­si­taires dans cet arti­cle du blog In the library with the lead […]

  Reply
• Joyd says:

  October 21, 2009 at 6:28 am

  Great infor­ma­tion

  Reply