Like, Share, Discover: Facebook For Scientists

A portion of Ijad Madisch's profile on ResearchGate, a networking site for scientists that he created.

 

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MICHELE NORRIS, host: Now the story of an important new social network and the Harvard start-up behind it. But we're not talking about Facebook.

Curt Nickisch from member station WBUR in Boston reports that the goal here is for social media to speed up the pace of scientific progress.

CURT NICKISCH: Ijad Madisch could not figure out why his experiment wasn't working. This was a few years ago when he was a researcher at Harvard. And the way he was setting up the experiment wasn't quite right.

Mr. IJAD MADISCH (Researcher, Harvard University): And these are the small things, which in science, you know, cost you a lot of time.

NICKISCH: His adviser didn't know. Nobody in his lab worked on the same stuff. None of his researcher friends could help.

Mr. MADISCH: I was so frustrated. I said, you know, there has to be something online where I go, where people can, you know, present themselves as a scientist, where they put their information about their research and publications and you can search for it.

NICKISCH: That's when Madisch got the idea for a scientist network: a Web platform for researchers to connect with each other and share best practices. Not lab secrets, but the information that doesn't get published. Madisch thinks ResearchGate will make scientists more productive.

Mr. MADISCH: My goal: to win the Nobel Prize. And I really believe in that. Like, if we think that ResearchGate will accelerate research in all the different fields, it will change the speed of science significantly in the future. So, I definitely believe that ResearchGate could win the Nobel Prize for that.

NICKISCH: That big idea ambition wowed investors. ResearchGate got funded by a former Facebook executive and the same venture capital firm that backed Twitter. So far, 900,000 people have signed up as members.

Ms. CAROLINE MOORE-KOCHLACS (Neuroscientist, Boston University): Logging in.

(Soundbite of typing)

NICKISCH: One of them is Caroline Moore-Kochlacs, who's logging on to the website at her Boston University office. Her profile page shows her picture, her field of neuroscience(神经科学), her adviser and publications. She can follow other researchers or click onto group pages that discuss specific topics.

Ms. MOORE-KOCHLACS: Let's see what's going on in the computational(计算的;计算机的) neuroscience group today.

NICKISCH: Moore-Kochlacs says she uses Facebook, too. But on there, people feel like they have to be clever or have mass appeal.

Ms. MOORE-KOCHLACS: What's the best camera to buy? I'm going on a vacation. They're never anything to do with science.

NICKISCH: Moore-Kochlacs likes ResearchGate because she can ask obscure questions about algorithms(运算法则). She also gets up to date on recent publications.

Ms. MOORE-KOCHLACS: The scientific literature is so huge at this point that it's really impossible to get through, you know, everything in your topic area. People really rely on hearing it from other people.

NICKISCH: Not every ResearchGate user is seeing the network effect. Kim Bertrand is an epidemiologist(流行病学家) at the Harvard School of Public Health.

Ms. KIM BERTRAND (Epidemiologist, Harvard School of Public Health): Sometimes I get these emails that are like: Dear Sirs: Writing a dissertation on public health. Any suggestions? Please advise. I don't need that.

NICKISCH: Founder Ijad Madisch knows his site will only prove valuable if researchers use it to help each other, not just steal each other's ideas. But he says if he can build ResearchGate into an indispensable social network for scientists, that he can make more of a contribution that way than he could as a lone researcher.

(Soundbite of music)

NICKISCH: For NPR News, I'm Curt Nickisch in Boston.

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