ResearchGate: Snippet on the social media for you
ResearchGate is one of the biggest and popular social media platforms for researchers, scientists and academicians where they can connect with top researchers and academicians. 1,2 It was created by the trio- Ijad Madisch, Sören Hofmayer & Horst Fickenscher and launched on May 2008. Bill Gates is one of the top identifiable seed investors after putting $35million with Tenaya Capital in the firm headquartered in Berlin, Germany.2 The site is https://www.researchgate.net
In the last 8 years, it has garnered 11million users worldwide, currently ranked 576 on Alexa and deemed the largest academic social network in terms of active users.1 The New York Times in 2012 in an article by Thomas Lin, he described the site as a combination of Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.3 A blogging opportunity to write review on shared articles on the site, ask questions and be answered by experts, in addition to engaging in private discussions of various topics with other researchers.1,3
Figure 1: Map showing others institution researchers UCH member have collaborated with. Source: ResearchGate UCH page
The site currently allows you as a researcher to share papers, ask and answer questions, view job listings and find collaborators.3 It serves as a great place to showcase your research endevours & outputs and get inspired in a research career path. Currently, it has many of our trainers and teachers on the site. It serves as a good avenue to follow their good works and alternative opportunity to be exposed to their research outputs. There are probably a few faculties that do not have a member that is a performer on the platform due to their prolific output.
It serves as a site to get many full journal articles which are otherwise not available openly on other sites websites such as Google Scholar or PubWeb. Currently, there are not less than 350,000 full articles self-reposited on the site.3 This is no doubt a big opportunity to get a rich cache of full article for your research, especially for post-part one candidates.
The alternative social media for researchers include academia.edu and Mendeley although may not be popular as a social media platform for researchers. Mendeley is much popular here in Nigeria as a reference manager rather than a social media platform for researchers.
And as Thomas Lin quoted Maxine Clarke, executive editor of the commercial journal Nature “a unit to award grants or assess jobs and tenure.” regarding research publications, it may be about time getting on the train since a resident post fellowship academic career depends on research.3 So getting into a “cyber-research place” for inspiration may be a way to go.
Written and modified by
Dr. Oladimeji Adebayo ( https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Oladimeji_Adebayo4 )
**First published by the author in Secretariat bulletin of the Association of Resident doctors, UCH, Ibadan. Vol 1 no 3(March issue, 2017)
References
1. ResearchGate. Wikepedia 2017 (2017).at <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ResearchGate>
2. ResearchGate. CrunchBase (2017).at <https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/researchgate#/entity>
3. Lin, T. Cracking Open the Scientific Process. New York Times (2012).
Interesting and informative read. Indeed the way to go.