Yet another social networking site popped up on my radar yesterday, so I decided to take a look at it. It’s called Academici, in theory it’s a social networking site for Academic-related work. However, what it actually is is something much poorer, and more useless.
In a nutshell: You can only provide a scant amount of business contact information and virtually no, actual, critical academic information. And to do anything remotely useful, that’s when it’s time to shell out the cash. I was grossly dissapointed with this site. However, what I would like to discuss is my vision of a good academic social networking site. Here are some of the most critical features:
- Papers – You can provide a form to post papers. It would be nice to be able to: Upload the paper, provide the abstract, authors, where it was accepted to (optional), title, papers that it cites, etc. Much of this could probably be done automatically from a latex file.
- Citations – Having a network based upon citations would be very powerful – you could see not only what papers cite other papers but who cites other people. You could begin to see these other networks form and possibly the people who are at the head of their field.
- Collaboration – Being able to collaborate with other academics on papers and projects would be critical. Listing your skills, research groups that you’ve been with, and work that you’re looking to do would be an excellent start towards this.
- Groups – Being able to set up research groups/corporations would be really interesting. You could see everyone who is in the (in my case) Data Mining Research Group, or everyone who was in that group. That alone would be very powerful as you could see where people might get some of their influence from.
These are just a few suggestions that I’ve been able to think of off the top of my head and I can tell that I’m only just scratching the surface. This really needs to be explored further. Maybe in the form of a fun side project?
Prof. Dr. Markus Vinzent (May 19, 2005 at 10:06 am)
Dear John,
thanks for your critical comments. Although the comments are already a bit outdated – and I have just come across them, they are still valuable and it is quite nice to see that some of your suggestions match the progress that our site has taken since it was launched on 5 March. Indeed, at the beginning you were only able to provide a small amount of so-called business contact information which was due to the licenced software. In the meantime, we have added a nice academic details part for actual academic information. More important, your suggestions and vision of a good academic networking site:
Papers – one has to keep the balance between a (review or peer review) journal and a social networking site. As there is a difference between what one does together with a partner in a ballroom and a bed, one should respect the difference between a journal and a social networking site. So the vision about the paper seems rather odd to me. To keep the discussion going, it is better (as we do), not to overload the text with pictures, videos, lengthy arguments, but to summarise your principal idea, put an abstract about papers, books, reviews …. with links from forum entries and ask people to either respond or read and look further. In addition, we provide blogs for longer entries.
Citations: This is a suggestion that one can follow up, but needs a lot of thoughts. Citation indices are mechanical, networking has to be sociable, but as I said, it is worth exploring.
Collaboration: That is what we have realized since we have a full forum section, an event section and you can even look for cooperation partners in your academic details.
Groups: As before, this is realised. On academici you can create now internal, even invisible groups (Postgraduate working groups, PhD-communities, research working groups…) and open communities (like research communities, HR-Communities…).
And, indeed, we are just at the beginning of our further development. As the number of thousands of scholars of over 130 countries (after 9 weeks) show, academici has been accepted and has become the website for social academic and academically related business networking.
Richard Hudak (June 8, 2006 at 10:05 am)
Academici seems oriented toward connecting people with business interests to those in academia. For people doing pure research, or research that is (perhaps intentionally) unhelpful to corporations, it doesn’t seem to be that useful.
We need an academic social network that suits the purposes of academics and is not in any way connected with profit.
Matthew Simoneau (August 20, 2007 at 3:38 pm)
“Nature” is trying to solve some of these problems, according to a podcast I listened to recently:
http://www.itconversations.com/shows/detail1864.html