Carolina Science Concourse

Mass-market social networks (like Facebook or MySpace) have been very popular and networks for specialized users offer networking possibilities for both social and professional purposes. Lisa Johnston reviewed several online social networking sites that specifically target scientists in the May 2008 issue of SciTech News. This posting contains selections and descriptions from her article.

Pronetos
This site includes nice researcher-oriented user profile fields such as publications, courses, professional organizations, etc. Instead of adding contacts as “friends” like in Facebook et al, in Pronetos, users add “colleagues.” This site has a small user population now, but it seems likely to grow with its set of features.

BioMedExperts
BioMedExperts serves as a social platform for the PubMed database and is directed at life and health science researchers. Anyone who has published three or more papers indexed by PubMed in the past 10 years can get a pre-analyzed profile, but anyone is free to create their own profile.

MyExperiment
Created by university scientific researchers, this site aligns with scientific needs. Currently, posting and downloading workflows is the focus of the site, but there are plans for technical support, open-source applets for creating data mashups and an e-print repository.

Nature Network
The focus of this site is on writing. This takes the form of blog posts, comments and discussion forums. Users may also include profile information such as citations, interests and career information. There is even a Science Communicators of North Carolina group.

Scirus Topics Pages
This site from publisher Elsevier is less a networking site than a moderated, science-only alternative to Wikipedia. It is just beginning, but it offers the promise of scientific experts summarizing their subject areas in a highly technical format. The Google Knol project is a similar idea, but it is not yet available to the public.