Social Networking for Researchers – A good idea?

In a recent post, I profiled SocialSci.com, which is aiming to make social sciences studies easier by creating a community of researchers and participants who interact and contribute online to the same studies. I thought SocialSci has great prospects and will be an attractive prospect for early stage venture capital funds.

Another company called Mendeley is also taking the idea of social networking around scientific research in a new direction. Mendeley is probably best described as the Last.fm of scientific papers. Whereas with Last.fm, communities are created around songs, artists and albums, with Mendeley, communities are formed around scientific papers or collection of scientific papers. Mendeley also comes with a cool downloaded tool that analyzes PDF on a computer and derive enough metadata from them to match them with the database of scientific paper on the website. With this tool, any one can almost instantly have their library of scientific papers indexed by Mendeley. Once this is done, Mendeley will analyze the content of the library and suggest other users with similar interest, or point to other research papers that might be of interests. I would be interested to know what are Mendeley business growth strategies – sites like Last.fm can depend on advertising revenue, but what revenue stream can Mendeley depend on? Of course, we also can mention that multitudes of social networks for scientists, most notably LabMeeting and Scitable (a new site by Nature magazine).These sites are very much in their infancy – some have just raised venture capital financing, and some might be looking for investors and time will tell whether they will actually have an impact on scientific research. For now though, I think it is a very good sign that people are looking to further science by creating innovative solutions and tools like those.