ResearchGate 3.0

I've blogged a couple of times about ResearchGate and set up a profile there early in the year. At the time, I wasn't impressed with the coverage of social sciences. Recently, I've noticed a flurry of activity on ResearchGate with a number of colleagues putting up profiles and publications. You can see diffusion in action through the social network. They also have improved coverage in the social sciences including assigning points based on impact factor to journals listed in the Social Science Citation Index. Of course, it would make more sense to use citations rather than impact factors, but the latter is much easier...

So far, I am still finding it less useful than academia.edu or even LinkedIn. I don't really find any of them terribly useful, though occasionally I have been led to an interesting paper...

ResearchGate

I just received an e-mail invitation to join ResearchGate. I'd never heard of this network before. In contrast to Academia.edu it seems to be organized more on disciplinary lines than institutional lines. I looked through some of the names of people who have registered under environmental economics and saw only one I knew. So it seems to be even less successful than Academia.edu so far at attracting the big names. I have a profile on Academia.edu mainly in order to attract visitors to my websites. I'm not sure that anything-gate is a good name for a website :)

Are you a member of ResearchGate? Have you thought about joining?

ResearchGate Revisited

Back in 2010 I blogged briefly about ResearchGate. Today, I saw this article in the New York Times heavily featuring the site. I wonder if they sent a press release to the NYT that triggered this article? Anyway, I decided I should set up a profile on ResearchGate. I only managed to find two of my papers via their search engine - both from 2011. I wasn't impressed. I have a unique academic name (No other academic has both these initials together with my surname: D. I. Stern) so it shouldn't be too hard. I found two economists at ANU on the site already. Searches for "environmental economics" and "energy economics" didn't bring up anyone else I knew. So I'm not impressed and won't visit this site very often.

In a follow up to the NYT article, Krugman discusses how things work in economics and how it's changed. Back in 1993 when I was a post-doc at York part of my job was setting up working papers exchanges with other institutions. We'd mail them our papers if they'd mail us theirs. Soon after that, WoPEc, the predecessor of RePEc, got started and I've been involved with that ever since.

Unionization in Australian Universities

After seeing that Alison Booth's paper from the Quarterly Journal of Economics was the most downloaded paper from ResearchGate at Crawford this week, I was curious what fraction of employees at Australian universities belonged to the National Tertiary Education Union. Apparently NTEU has 26,000 members. It also seems that there are 113,000 employees in the university sector. On that basis the unionization rate would be only 23%. Of course, quite a lot of those are casuals or PhD students working as lecturer A etc.* But the total number of full-time staff is 86,000. That implies 30%. Also there were 67,933 staff on continuing contracts. If the latter is the real target market for the union then the rate is 38%. Based on this, social custom doesn't work well in the university sector to overcoming free-riding. Let me know if any of my assumptions are wrong as this is the first time I've ever looked at this issue.

* There were 41,730 academics at levels B and above, but the union also represents non-academic staff.

Most Popular Posts of 2010

In case you missed one of my more popular posts from 2010, I'm kicking off 2011 with a list of the top ten hits. Actually, I saw a bunch of other much bigger bloggers doing this and was curious what my most popular posts were:

1. iamscientist. People are obviously very interested in learning more about this science social networking site.

2. 2009 Journal Citation Report Released. And people want to know which journals are highly ranked. Quite a few people asked me in e-mail to send the whole report. That's not possible.

3. Energy Mix and Energy Intensity. Part of my serialization of this paper.

4. The Ecological Economics Critique. Another part of my serialization of this paper.

5. ERA Ranked Journal List is Out. As well as the ranking by ISI people were interested in the Australian Research Council's ranking.

6. World Trade Report 2010.

7. The Rebound Effect. Yet another part of my serialization of this paper.

8. researchgate. Another social networking site.

9. New Controversy on Malaria and Climate Change. The paper on this topic is under review. I haven't put out a working paper version as it's not really an economics paper and working papers aren't the done thing in biology.

10. Job Talk Abstract. Everyone wants to know how to do a job talk. Unfortunately, they won't get much info at this post! This post is more useful.

ResearchGate Adds Department Statistics

Here is the link for Crawford School of Public Policy.

IAmScientist

My wife passed on an invitation she got to join a new site called I Am Scientist. Seems to be yet another competitor with ResearchGate, Academia.edu, CoS, ResearcherID and for economists RePEc. This site mainly seems to have medical scientists signed up so far. No-one yet seems to have the momentum of Facebook or LinkedIn in the academic space.