I was inspired by RG homepage where someone is offered to log in or connect with Facebook! What are the advantages and disadvantages of such approach? What is Your opinion?
As far as I could see, numerous answers to this question belong to my point of view, which is that no connection between RG and FB is needed! Also, there were some nice answers opposite from my opinion, primarily based on interoperability of different networks. Then, security and privacy appeared as issues! Most of us have pages on RG, IN, FB..., etc, and it requires a lot of time to spent in order to be accurate and serious member of a network. So, my primary network is ResearchGate.
FB link still appears on RG desktop! I did expect some feedback from RG professionals because there were many valuable suggestions for improvement RG portal! But, discussion is istill going on!
Regards and thanks for Your valuable answers!
Ljubomir Jacic
Hi, for me RG is business and facebook is private (and fun). Cheers, Nadine
I don't think linking RG with linkedin would be harmful to your online profile, but I don't think linking RG and fb is a good idea. Facebook is mostly for personal connections while RG and linkedin are more professional in nature.
Dear Ahed, dear Farid, RG is for work, facebook is private and fun. Here I am asking scientific questions and giving sientific answers. Facebook is for my friends and hobbies (like diving etc.). Cheers, Nadine
Surely, it would connect RG and Linkedin (maybe also Academia.edu), since they are strictly related to work/academia world. Surely, Twitter and Facebook regards especially personal hobbies and friends. But, I am not sure completely sure about this. What happens if someone creates a Facebook page regardings its research project or academic work? My final answer is: it depends!
I have no plans to connect to Facebook and I'm seriously considering leave LinkedIn.
Too much garbage on my desk. I have not time to clean this sort of things up.
RG has been very serious and academic up to now. I would greatly appreciate if this link is erased from RG desktop.
Mauricio: RG is often not very adademic. Read some questions some "researchers" are asking... UNBELIEVEABLE!
@Nadine, I do think that RG is serious as @Maurico said. I do believe that some questions are really amazing, but it is exception, isn't it?
Sorry, RG is serious but some questions from researchers are not serious (not very often but in the last time it's rising up).
@Ljubomir, I think we should not miscellanies the social networks. In last month the quality of answers in RG will be worst. The bad tone of LinkedIn we can find in answers of RG. I’ve given a notice to RG-admins. Admins intervene not and claim, all member of RG should help for a good quality of RG!
Facebook is not a social network, it's a shareholder controlled company offering services, e.g. for social networking and advertising. I don't recommend RG to be part of this.
Comparing Facebook and Google+ I would say that on G+ we have reasonable control over our actions. On G+ we could set up circles (on RG they call this Topics), with which we can individually share ideas and information. We can also control how much of the general blathering we want to see in the Live View there. Another interesting thing is the opportunity to establish video chats with more than one person, like a mini conference. I have thought of sending a feature to the RG development team.
Hi all
I hope RG and FB is never link or have any sort of relation. RG is more on research matter and FB is more on social enjoyment and life status sharing matter.
If RG and FB married together, may be some non research people can access and read RG thing but, that not necessary.
If RG, Mendeley, Google Scholar, ReasearcID, Academia ... is link, that much more better and easy to manage but user.
Regards,
M.M.Noor
that a good idea to share the RG score on facebook and linked IN.
I think we should concentrate on the research and discussion related discussion without thinking about the RG Score.
Because RG score is just for initail it can not improve your profile. the profile can only improve by technical paper and discussion.
I dont think the RG score represent the Technical knowledge of a candidate or organization. I have approximately 20 research paper which my school have only 5 paper on research gate how can it possible.
Agree with M.M. Noor, no need for FB. RG should be for research only.
Its not good idea to connect RG with FB because FB is something personal and RG is purely research connection, What my point is that there must be some difference between research and personal .....
It is a bad choice. The RG represents the scientific community with its interest and information, the social network are different.
No Facebook, I agree. It would be worth trying Google Plus circles, though, as I said above.
Hi agree with many people said above to have RG seperate and no to Facebook. In my experience Facebook has certain useful information but time killing. Hope so RG is to gain & share technical knowledge. But it can have Linkedin to improve contact among the peers.
An excess of information is equivalent to no information. I think that in Facebook there is too much trivial information. In RG, at least, there is only room for scientifical topics and scientist. There are also other scientific nets, for instance,
https://www.academia.edu/
or
http://atomiumculture.eu/content/reisearch-research-excellence-innovation-network
How about students being involved in research? At some universities it is quite important to bring students in research projects. Can Academia.edu or Orcid be
recommended to students? Any suggestions on hat can be done at undergraduate
level will be highly appreciated.
Other comments are surely good. In any case, I think that we should integrate different information from social networks in only one profile. Probably, this may create privacy problems. In any case, I think we cannot consider a person from only one point of view. So I think we should integrate many aspects of a person in order to give a complete description of a person profile from different points of view. For instance, I don't remember the source, but job interviewers start to consider your profile on the network in order to understand your reputation. Thus, it is mandatory to collect together everything that can help to improve your reputation.
@David, the reputation needed for an effective job interview can only be the 'professional reputation', at least according to the labour laws in democratic countries. Facebook friends should not be part of the professional reputation, because Facebook is only a toy for people with too much time to waste. I'm not active on Facebook, but I've seen my wife's page there with a lot of advertizing. I don't want this, and I would delete my account here, if RG would introduce ads on my page here.
Moreover, it scares me to massively collect data about individuals, researchers or not. Imagine what can be done with all your data collected (PRISM/TEMPORA). I'm strongly against bringing together 'all' data about RG users, on Facebook or wherever.
You hve reason i think that beter connect with other reseascher
Social networks form a new eco-system for individuals and businesses alike. In LinkedIn more than 20% of recruitment is ongoing there, Facebook and other social sites (although labeled waste of time) are data warehouses for heavy marketing and even new paradigms are appearing like "Content Management" to data mine whatever is there.
Therefore, it is up to the person's choice to share his/her profile or not with other networks. That is, if you push the button to share then it means you have studied the matter well. Therefore, I recommend Research Gate to keep the sharing windows for whoever decides to do so. Others who are not interested, well, it is their decision.
I am a member of at least eight social network groups, I find what suits me to improve my profile and my hobbies.
Best to all.
@ Pandya, you need not a link to LinkedIn. LinkedIn has without your authorisation copied automatically your profile to LinkedIn!
This webspace is created for researchers only, I think if we link up all the accounts we will creat unnecessary mess up for our ownselves
Every time I visited social networks I found that I spend a little longer than I wanted with them. The social networks are designed with deep subtleties to manipulate us for exploiting our inherent human being psychological weaknesses. From this point of view, they are not honest. Their interests are primarily commercial.
I am for independence of RG.
Vitaly Voloshin gains a point. I agree. I am convinced that RG, Academia, FB (and so on) are basically equivalent. Only the target changes, but not much. So, if we integrate them in one tool, it would be very interesting.
To answer this question, I think we should get back to the main purpose/theme of each social network, which I find different between one and another- as Vasile mentioned (Amusement, Connections, Business, Research), however, I think we can't underestimate the positive role of each network (I have conducted research about the role of Facebook in promoting science among the students and the public).
As for the Research Gate network, I think one of the main goals of this network is to employ Social Learning to connect researchers from different places and disciplines to solve/discuss research issues. So, in my view, giving the researcher access to different networks is useful to get acquaintance, but involving everyone in serious research problems will be distracting.
I think it is not good to establish connection between ResearchGate and other social networks such as LinkedIn, Facebook. Because the RG is specially for related to the research. And if there is connection betwenn RG and other social network, so may be some one can intrupt to some one wantedly and/or will be face some other problems.
Different social networks are present for different purposes. The members also have different characteristics. Intersection set of two or more groups may not be empty but that doesn't mean that their union is always possible. A member of RG can become a member of FB but simultaneous activity may not give a good result.
@Vitaly Voloshin,
Of course, RG is also commercial to the extent that self-promotion is a commercial operation. Any scientific events - conferences, workshops or journals - resemble with a fair, a market for own achievements, to get funding, awards or recognition. Also this is the case of RG. But there is a detail that changes everything: true researcher is only one who is motivated by native curiosity, who has the curiosity gene. The curiosity can motivate us without a commercial purpose, only to meet a psychological need stimulated by culture.
For this reason, RG should be kept separate from other social networks.
I agree with Pavel, Mohammad and Anup. I would not appreciate a link from Facebook (being a non-member there myself) to ResearchGate, maybe even with Mark Zuckerberg's face recognition feature for my profile photo here on RG to improve personalisation of advertisements. That could be a consequence of bringing the personal data of all of us together. I don't want this deveopment.
If we are honest we know that all these social websites are commercial at some level but Facebook is probably the most commercial. I don't use Facebook and don't see any advantage to linking this site with Facebook or any other non-academic social site. I don't want personalised adverts just because I looked at something as part of some research.
It's not a question of good or bad for me. But when social media use similar or common data it can make a lot of sense to enable interoperability between services. What doesn't make sense is to privilege one social media service over another - why FaceBook & not Google plus or LinkedIn? What bothers me more is how the social-media-enabled-web can also foster tribal attitudes. While I can see an argument for keeping the functional boundaries of different services distinct that shouldn't mean that there is no interoperability. eg., LinkedIn would benefit from being able to include feeds from publications lists on RG or Academia etc. In the bibliographic world there's increasing interoperability between services like ResearcherID & ORCID.
There are many such social networks. However I feel they can be clustered using their group activity domain information. Though this classification may not be unique but would follow a definite pattern. I think there can be interactions among different networks included in the same cluster. Loose coupling may be allowed between the clusters with small difference. But clusters with larger distance between them should never be allowed to interact. I think there should be some research efforts for such classification.
I think there is no need to connect, else there are number of peoples on RG which not really interested in education.
It is fantastic to be able to share with our colleagues our work as our difficulties, I hope this type of platform allows better development of knowledge.
The research is something specifically and come from inner need for knowledge. This aspect isn't obvious for most people, so it can bring understanding from most members of another social networks.
I dare say it is good to improve your connectivity and bad for your privacy
This is something that I'm still trying to figure out, I know that there are a lot of folks out there talking about marketing ones self, making connections, etc. and clearly this has a role in being successful, at least in promulgating one's ideas. But I also think that it's clear that there's a lot of nuance - not all connections are equal, particularly for a given purpose. To wit, industrial and academic connections, while possessing a great deal of overlap, are very different. That said, I think that there's a lot of value to be had in providing some cross connections (and hopefully some cross-pollination) but I think that merely having networks connected is insufficient - the perspectives, needs/wants, even vocabulary can be very different. The other thing that I think about is how central LinkedIn has been to NSA activities, tracking down engineers in India and using the information sucked in from the website to find IT workers as targets for exploitation...
As far as I could see, numerous answers to this question belong to my point of view, which is that no connection between RG and FB is needed! Also, there were some nice answers opposite from my opinion, primarily based on interoperability of different networks. Then, security and privacy appeared as issues! Most of us have pages on RG, IN, FB..., etc, and it requires a lot of time to spent in order to be accurate and serious member of a network. So, my primary network is ResearchGate.
FB link still appears on RG desktop! I did expect some feedback from RG professionals because there were many valuable suggestions for improvement RG portal! But, discussion is istill going on!
Regards and thanks for Your valuable answers!
Ljubomir Jacic
I think it is better linkage between him and social networking to another for the benefit of the many students of science
Although I made pretty good research contacts through RG, let me tell you how much I am interested in Facebook: My wife told me 6 months ago that, I didn't have a picture on my Facebook account ... which made me realize that, I actually DID HAVE A FACEBOOK ACCOUNT :) I must have created it at some point ... I gave my password to her, and she uploaded my picture :) And, I think, I FRIENDed her :) :) :)
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I do like the RG structure, which provides an avenue for scholars to establish a NETWORK with each other. These contacts turn into potential co-authorships, and even research collaborations. One such contact of mine invited me to write a book chapter, which I did. This is about when I became a believer of the RG concept.
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Facebook is more for sharing photos, etc ... and, comparing Facebook to RG is absurd !!! Facebook is SOCIAL NETWORKING, and I see RG as SCHOLAR NETWORKING. If the readers of this posting are anybody like me, the two crowds have minimally-overlapping interests.For that matter, if you have to make a comparison, compare RG to LinkedIn or Plaxo ... Except, RG did a 100x better job than LinkedIn or Plaxo ... with its dynamic structure.
Well, an issue that seems to come up through these discussions is the TIME that we spend - indeed... I totally agree that any network including RG take time! but it seems on RG we are talking to peers - I did not try FB to know with whom you would be or you would not be discussing issue - if any discussion occurs at all... I am not sure of that!
Theodora, about your comment on "time we spend on RG." ... Compare the time you are spending on RG chit chatting with scholars to going to a conference to present your paper ...
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In the end, conference papers do not get cited as much as journal papers ... So, why bother with conference papers, and only submit journal papers ??? I view conference papers a lot more about "networking with other scholars in your area." You can sit at your institution and publish journal papers and never shake any hands ... Sure, if your journal papers are good, people will read them, cite them, and know about you ... However, conference papers bring a lot more DYNAMISM into the equation ... They allow you to not only publish, but, actively promote your idea ... You go to the conference, promote your idea, shake hands, and let people know that, you are working on this ...
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I view RG the same way ... Part of it is chit chatting, and LEARNING about other people, other research topics, etc ... I learned a lot by just reading some discussion threads, without participating ... But, part of it is communicating with other scholars in the same field and introducing yourself, your ideas, as well as understanding them ...
Do you agree ?
Well said Tolga. Networking in conferences is as vital as oxygen to the brain.
As FB is more private and personal network I am not so sure that linking would be fruitful, but I am voting for connection to LinkedIn. Even better , there is a need of research only network, where persons from around the world could discuss and prepare projects.
Best
Dragan Cisic
I dont feel any harm in it as long as it moves in a right way. RG has been a great platform to discuss research related issues with global and potential measure. At the same time popularity of FB and LinkedIn like social netwoking sites can not be ignored. By bridging the network with different tags can add more awareness and spectrum to the RG. So it should be absolutely fine for a good reason
Regards,
Ajit
My dear colleagues, thanks a lot for such good answers. 80 answers (more than 600 views) is not a small response, taking into a account the period of thread's posting. Frankly, I expected more answers! Looking to hear from those who followed but did not anwered yet! Thanks!
Don't like FB and all sort of social networks. Anyone want to engage in discussion in RG can simply log in. That is sufficient already
Since there are many RG stuff present on ResearchGate as a members, I do call them to present their ideas, views....! Facebook is still there on RG homepage!
There are pros and cons on establishing connection between ResearchGate and other Social networking sites, but if you see the pros it is good, because finally it should reach the people who are interested but are unreachable to get their needed stuff.
I will not say this as a negative thing about ResearchGate but the one point on ResearchGate is that people who don't have any domain mail ids(as one can't create account in ResearchGate using gmail,ymail,hotmail,etc) i.e. who are doing research by self and there are most universities around the globe which doesn't give their domain mail ids to students, in that case by no way it is possible for them to connect with researchers in ResearchGate, so the only medium they have is social networking sites. As to create account in ResearchGate, it requires a mail id associated with any institution/corporate.
Thinking from that sense, I think its good for those needy people who are thirst of knowledge to get connected with the people of their profession/research.
Arunkumar brought in an important observation. I know many colleagues who registered themselves in Academia.edu site.
Dear friends, we celebrate Christmas in Serbia, as well as many of the Eastern Orthodox Church, according to the Julian calendar. Today is Christmas Eve! Merry Christmas to all who celebrate! I wish you all the best!
Dear Ljubomir, if you want the 'big brother' to have a complete picture of you and your whole family and friend network, then, yes you can combine anything! I don't advice you to do so, keep a little bit privacy...
@Demetris, yes, I am aware of that! I do not link these different social networks!
You can not get away from Big Brother!
Good one Demetris and Ljubomir. I think one has to be careful what to publish in any of the social network sites. I do have access to many and I only share what I decide to without going very generous for the Big Brother to have fun!
@Hussin, excellent comment :)
My formula is to use social networks for the "bright side," not the "dark side" :)
This is not just RG. It includes our classrooms, and families, etc.
*** Negativity is a virus that can spread on contact and is also airborne :) Possibly worse than SARS, and N1H1. You need weeks to get rid of it, and sometime you can't :) It kills you :) :) :)
*** Positivity is a bacteria that is difficult to spread, but is a useful bacteria for the body :) If you try hard, you can get rid of it too, but, you shouldn't :)
Today is the first time I saw this question. I'm more used to the RG environment. I haven't logged into RG from FB. Both FB and LI are blocked by our Ministry of Education, so my opportunities to explore that environment is a lot less. (Wifi connection isn't good here, so I rely on the fixed line office internet.)
Actual question! At first I found FB rather attractive. There are a lot of my students, relatives and friends from all over the world. It's so fascinating to discuss a lot of nonofficial problems with them. I highly appreciate messengers there and possibility to replace a lot of pictures, photos, which I'm fond of a lot.Then I faced other problems.I understood that this net could be dangerous for such sort of person, like me. Being open-minded, extremely friendly, emphatic, tolerant,adventurous,I couldn't reject a lot of "friends"(who knows, what are they in real life), caught a lot of SPAM, and was obliged to read unpleasant opinions of anonymous persons, far from my values.I can't remove them, that's why I decided not to visit my page.As for RG, I wrote a lot of times, that this net is the most solid and serious- aesthetic, knowledgeable with the best intelligent human beings. ,
Strong point Irina. I visit FB from time to time to share valuable pieces of knowledge to my students and others, I write also straightforward thoughts that bring people together with all the events ongoing in our area and around the globe. I did not experience negative events thanks God. I also enjoy RG for the community it has and the good thing you learn new things from RG or other sites as you decide to do it.
Here are the downvoters again! Anonymity is a lovely shade of cowardice!
I second your point Ljubomir. I wonder what type of scholar is not ready to bring issues and make a stance.
Dear Prof. Ljubomir Jacić,
In my opinion Research Gate objective and approach is totally different than Facebook and LinkedIn.
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