We’ve been getting more and more questions in the library about how researchers can find information from other disciplines. For example, how can someone working on membranes in Psychiatry connect up with someone working on membranes in Materials Science? In a world where waiting for the published article is increasingly too late, we’ve been trying to find new avenues.
To answer the question above, I thought, ‘I wonder if there is a social networking site for scientists?’, did a Google search, and voila – Labmeeting!
The interesting part about Labmeeting is that it is only freely available to scientific researchers. You have to either get invited by a scientific researcher you know, or show online proof that you are doing scientific research. Or pay $99. Thus, not being a scientific researcher, nor willing to part with $99 for a look-see, I was unable to join.
A search on Duke presented 120 results and included the following:
- Associate Professor at Duke University interested in the following topics: Monomeric lambda repressor, Ribonuclease P protein, Protein A, NMR, CD, fluorescence, stopped flow, amide exchange, dynamic NMR
- PhD Student at Duke University interested in the following topics: In vivo model systems, genetic screens, immunoblotting
- PhD Student at Duke University interested in the following topics: Photonics
Give it a shot and let us know what you think: http://www.labmeeting.com
Addendum: As William Gunn points out in the comments below, there are other similar tools which you may want to try. They include:
- https://www.researchgate.net/
- http://www.mendeley.com/
- http://www.academia.edu/
- http://www.myexperiment.org/
Hi Jean! Just wanted to drop you a note to make you aware of another tool that your patrons could use to find researchers across disciplines. Mendeley is a tool for organizing and sharing academic literature (think itunes for PDFs), but it also has an online networking component. For example, here’s my profile on Mendeley and here’s a public collection of papers compiled by another researcher on bacterial biofilms, which you can even subscribe to via RSS.
If you have any questions, feel free to get in touch with me via email.
Here’s an article that describes a set of requirements for social networking tools for researchers — in biomed, but most reqs are probably generalizable to other fields:
Schleyer, T., et al. (2008). Facebook for Scientists: Requirements and Services for Optimizing How Scientific Collaborations Are Established. Journal of Medical Internet Research, 10(3). http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?artid=2553246