Social networking sites (such as Facebook and MySpace) are all the rage, but they are not just intended for high school and college students to interact with one another. There is an entire new generation of web-based social network sites geared to scientists, physicians, researchers, and the like.

We suggest you take a closer look at:

2collab

Developed by Elsevier and launched in 2007, 2collab is an online collaboration tool for researchers. It aims to enable the sharing and discussing of relevant research among users. 2collab provides bookmarking and reference management capabilities, private groups for faculty or research teams, author profiles, and a database of peer-reviewed journals. Scopus and ScienceDirect provide links to 2collab; users can also download a browser tool for adding URLs. You must register (your name and email address) to access the full functionality of 2collab (create your own groups, join in discussions, add bookmarks).

BioMedExperts

Collexis launched its literature-based social networking platform BioMedExperts in January 2008 with the stated goal of bringing researchers together and allowing them to grow their professional network. BioMedExperts connects biomedical researchers to each other through the display and analysis of the networks of co-authors with whom each investigator works to publish scientific papers. The comprehensive system of pre-populated expert profiles, coupled with the ability to analyze all associated professional connections within the co-author network, allows scientists and researchers across organizations the ability to share data and collaborate in new ways. BME currently contains profiles of about 1.4 million biomedical experts from more than 150 countries.

Users must register to use BioMedExperts. BME experts can access the system to revise and/or update their personal details, publications, and/or preferences. The current service is free, though paid premium services may be added later.

BioWizard

BioWizard is a free, web-based community for life scientists and physicians founded in 2005 by scientists and researchers from the University of Pennsylvania, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and the University of Oxford. BioWizard offers a community-driven Featured Articles section, PubMed search capability, up-to-the-minute field-specific news, table of contents from all major scientific and medical journals, a comprehensive products search, and online blogs that assist researchers in searching, sharing and discussing scientific information. Users can customize BioWizard by changing the homepage layout and content, saving PubMed search terms and results, storing articles of interest, and emailing articles to colleagues with personalized messages.

The BioWizard Basic service is free; there is a paid enhanced service called BioWizard Scholar (currently available for $9.99/month) which provides access to a Conference Proceedings Database.

Ganfyd

Ganfyd is a collaborative medical reference by medical professionals and invited non-medical experts. This free medical knowledge base, structured in a wiki format, is open for all users to read, though only registered medical practitioners may contribute content. The wiki uses the same wiki software as the increasingly popular Wikipedia.

Ganfyd (which stands for “get a note from your doctor”) was initiated in 2005 by a group of doctors and medical students in the U.K. to contribute their knowledge and experience to the commonwealth.

labmeeting

labmeeting.com is a web-based social network service that allows academic scientists to connect with others, present their work, and organize information related to their research. labmeeting is a closed community, exclusively for members of the academic community (i.e. current students, research fellows, research assistants, or professors at accredited research institutions). Users can upload and organize lab data, protocols, and papers; find and collect new articles; and manage a lab webspace that allows sharing and interaction with a specific group of users.

Users must register to use the service. Once a member, you can change your profile information and control how other members and the service communicate with you.

LabSpaces.net

LabSpaces.net was designed to spread scientific news, maintain and create friendships, and harbor collaboration through the internet. The site serves as a web profile for researchers and labs, and also as a community for active communication in the sciences. Features include a Science News feed updated daily with about 40 news articles, UserProfiles, Friends, a Messaging System, Groups, Lab Profiles with Lab members, Lab Picture albums, Collaboration Profiles, Science Discussion Forum, Publication Database, Protocol Database, and free Blogs for each user.

Mendeley

Though primarily social software for managing and sharing research papers, Mendeley also acts as a social networking site for discovering research trends and connecting to like-minded academics. Mendeley Desktop is free downloadable academic software for managing and sharing research papers. Mendeley Web incorporates the online collaboration features and allows online access to your library of papers. The developers are working on a “recommendation engine” that will analyze the publications in your personal library and recommend other papers that you might find relevant. Mendeley is designed for use by researchers and scholars in all academic disciplines.

Nature Network

Nature Network, developed by the Nature Publishing Group in 2007, is a free, professional networking web site for scientists around the world. The site allows users to connect with fellow scientists through forums, groups and blogs. Local city hubs (under development) allow users to interact at the local level – city pages feature listings of upcoming seminars and conferences, news and job listings.

Users must register in order to post comments in discussion forums, list events, join groups, create a profile and personal network, and create a blog. Profile pages describe your research, interests, and projects. You can form or join groups set up around an area of interest or research, or for your lab, department or institution.

Ozmosis

Ozmosis is a platform for a physicians-only online exchange dedicated to the discovery and sharing of medical knowledge and the improvement of patient care. The site aggregates the collective wisdom and experience of its physician members and transforms individual insights into a knowledge-base of trusted and reliable clinical, practice management and health policy information. Physicians can use tools on Ozmosis to bookmark and post content from anywhere on the Web, submit questions or clinical cases, and search PubMed articles. Ozmosis is free to all U.S. licensed physicians – to be invited to join the Ozmosis community, you must either receive an email invitation from a current member or you may request an invitation for a limited number of openings.

ResearchGATE Scientific Network

ResearchGATE aims to provide a global web-based environment in which scientists can interact, exchange knowledge, and collaborate with researchers of different fields. Based on the underlying belief that communication between scientists will accelerate the distribution of new knowledge and that scientific social networks will facilitate and improve the way scientists collaborate, ResearchGATE bills itself as the first virtual scientific community.

Registered users can personalize their profile, customize the ResearchGATE user interface, join or create groups, discover publications and related researchers. There are also keyword search function and similar abstract search functions available.

SciLink

SciLink is a free online community with the goal of helping users discover scientists, authors, and relationships. SciLink’s network of over 104 million relationships is built by mining scientific data that exist on the web. SciLink’s databases contain over 5.8 million scientists and 14 million articles. Registered users can create and join groups, upload and share files, answer questions posed by other users, find job and funding opportunities, and access current scientific news from around the web. The SciLink user’s profile is similar to a Facebook profile and allows customization by adding and rearranging widgets. SciLink also includes a citation manager function with an import/export feature allowing users to manage citations from EndNote and ReferenceManager files.

SciTopics

SciTopics is a free wiki-like service for the scientific community, where scientific experts summarize specific scientific topics, and where links to the latest, most relevant journal literature and web sources are presented on one page. Selected authors are invited to write summaries on specific scientific, technical and medical topics for which they are considered to be experts. Authors provide a list of references and relevant links to other websites for more information. Automatically generated links to the most recent and most cited articles from Scopus and links to relevant results on the Web and news results via Scirus are also included on the SciTopics Page. (Scirus is Elsevier’s free, science-specific search engine.) SciTopics allows only registered “members” to add comments to the topic pages. You may request to become an author of a SciTopics page.

Everything on the SciTopics page falls under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License. This means that you can copy, distribute, transmit and adapt the text as long as you attribute the work in the manner specified by the author and you do not use it for commercial purposes.

SciVee

SciVee enables researchers to combine video with documentation and data in a media rich format, enabling scientists to make their research more visible, shareable, and accessible throughout the research cycle. By using SciVee’s “virtual studio” technology, users can enhance their journal articles and scientific posters by linking and synchronizing video explanations. Registered SciVee users can join and create communities and discussions, post comments on a video, send private messages to other members, create blogs, and organize events.

SciVee is operated in partnership with the Public Library of Science (PLoS), the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC).

Sermo

Sermo (Latin for conversation) is a physicians-only social network that allows physicians to exchange insights and observations in a collaborative online environment. Members can pose questions, provide answers and offer opinions as well as openly discuss their medical perspectives with one another. Sermo also enables physicians to be financially rewarded for their observations and clinical insights. The source of the rewards is financial institutions that access a stream of fresh and actionable information on emerging trends and market-changing events in healthcare. A cash reserve is set-aside to compensate physicians for observations that are deemed highly relevant and valuable. Sermo includes a CME component, with links to CME activities next to the relevant discussions. There is also a physician-to-physician job board.

Within3

Within3 is a private professional networking site that helps physicians, researchers, and other healthcare professionals and organizations, connect, collaborate, and find information on the basis of trusted relationships. Within3 provides an online environment where members connect with others through people they know, find and validate information, and collaborate online. In addition, members interact in private and public communities established by a wide range of professional organizations. Within3 is invitation only and free to individual professionals. There are three ways to join Within3 – get invited from a current Within3 member, accept a request to subscribe to an existing community, or create your own community for your institution or professional specialty.

 

For more information about Web 2.0 tools and applications, contact the Becker Medical Library Translational Research Support group.