Yes, According to me it helps in conduction of scientific research. It depends how you use it. Now a days many pages and groups are there on fb which emphasises on different research and development activities. After joining some of the groups you can share your ideas and also gain different ideas of others people in your field which will help you a lot in conduction of your research process. Many reputed universities has its own fb page specially for making their research activity available to common and interested peoples. If you will go through those pages on fb, many a times you will also find some ideas useful to you in your research projects and it might also happen that you could also develop one of your own.

Regards:

Nitish

we also spend a huge amount of time browsing, navigating... and as the different systems seem to sprawl like mushrooms after the rain, I am not sure it really helps...

It is very hard to say "No" while discussing this on Research Gate, so I will not.

Yet, I think that the role of social media should not be overrated. In my way of (admittedly oldfashioned...) way of working, I wil use the internet to find website, reports, and peer-reviewed literature. When desired, I contact people through email, so without any use of social media. In my mind, building networks still needs to happen during face-to-face meetings, not on Facebook. Having said that, there is definitively a divide between the younger generation and those that more reluctantly accept the role of new media...

Yes, but in a very limited way... I agree with C. Gomez, at the certain point it can be waste of time!

Thanks RG colleagues for the excellent discussion. For myself I think finding the right sources (twitter feeds, FB groups, etc..) is key to effectively using these sites in my work. So far, it hasn't really borne fruit. Like several of you, I also find myself using huge amounts of time to find these good sources. I wish there was a content aggregator, or topical list of resources I could search, but that would take someone a lot of time to produce! On the other hand, so there is so much more info available now by social media, and early career scientists are often better at participating, that it is probably just as matter of time before things get easier and more organized.

FB is a tool like many others, it depends on the way you using it: it can help and it can hurt.

For people working in social or human sciences (semioticians or specialists in media studies) FB - like Yout Tube Flickr, etc. - are phantastic study objects of how people create and maintain communities and identities, cultural references, and so on. So to speak, FB (like You Tube, ...) could be understood and used as a kind of virtual terrain - a big observatory - for digital humanities ...

We are actually researching this question. I have been interviewing social scientists for the past month on how they use various forms of social media in their research. Look for a paper by Beth Robelia and Chris Greenhow in the next year. We are still pouring through all the data. Many people use it to find and stay in touch with collaborators, do background research, find participants, and gather data. If you want to know more, message me.

Extending the view from FB/RG to other social facilitators, google-chat is useful for discussion, github is useful for sharing code development, and dropbox is useful for sharing data.