Currently in India there are discussions of imposing restrictions on social networking sites. Even educational institutions don’t encourage the use of such platforms. But there are many advantages to connecting with other people, especially in the sciences. Imagine members of a social network who are trying to identify a microbe and are not tagging a picture from a random party. ResearchGate is a professional network for scientists, to share their recent scientific work and discuss it with experts around the world. In Topics, members can discuss problems they face in the lab. According to Dr. Rajiv Gupta, a lecturer at the Harvard Medical School and MIT, “There are the Facebook-type social networking sites, but they have been sort of populated by teenagers. There is nothing there that is specific to doing research.” On ResearchGate, researchers can Follow their favorite scientist and they can read their publications and ask relevant scientific questions. Dr. Ijad Madisch, an alumni of Harvard Medical school and founder of ResearchGate, says that he came up with the idea for ResearchGate when he was stuck with a problem in his subject and could not find any answers. Within three years, the Network has grown to more than 1.3 million members from 123 countries.
What is the most exciting part for science enthusiasts and for educational institutes? The product is magnificently tailored to the researchers. The members have access to 45,000,000 abstracts and 350,000 publications, recommendations for conferences, related researchers and jobs – all simply by creating a profile. The profile is like a research curriculum vitae, which also includes publications. According to a New York Times article, Dr. Rajiv Gupta uses ResearchGate for his class notes. “There is so much activity online that he doesn’t have to answer the questions himself because someone else already has. The beauty of ResearchGate, he said, “is that the members are all there for a common purpose of advancing scientific research”. India continues to grow in the fields of science and technology. ResearchGate is the space for Indian scientists to become a part of this movement.
