La ricerca accademica sul web
Academic social networks
What are social networks? Let's get help from the Treccani Encyclopedia to give a definition:
"With the expression social network is identified the online service that allows the creation of virtual social networks"
[here you can find the whole entry, but to not translated in English]
There are different types of social networks and for different purposes, starting from Facebook (whose sole stated purpose is to "connect people") to social networks for sharing media (such as Instagram and Flickr), to those specific for professional exchange and business information (Linkedin) or reviews of services and tourist destinations (TripAdvisor).
Here we will talk about those social networks whose purpose is to exchange useful information for scientific research, especially academic. These sites are meant for the scientific community, including students.
Academic Social networks: ResearchGate and Academia.edu
These two social networks were created with the aim of providing an exchange platform for the scientific community. They allow researchers both to upload (and thus make public) their papers and to take advantage of the outcome of others' scholar work. Their internal search engines automatically analyze the profiles of their members and, based on the key terms identified in their profile descriptions and publications, suggest researchers, institutions and work in similar research fields. They are meant to facilitate the aggregation of member-researchers into groups with similar research profiles.
Research Gate
Research Gate looks like a classic social network, such as Facebook, but with features and functions aimed at facilitating members' research work. The first place in the profile, for example, is dedicated to "research project in progress", then you have social network's messages customized for each user and you can scroll through the news of other researchers followed. A handy text box allows you to ask the community for help, describing what you need.
Acedemia.edu
Academia.edu has a rather simpler interface, emphasizing above all its main function: exchange full-text articles with other scholars in the field.
Reference managers + social networks: Mendeley and Zotero
Mendeley and Zotero
Mendeley and Zotero differ from Research Gate and Academia.edu mainly for their origin: they were born as reference managers [see here the tutorial on reference managers], that is software for the management of bibliographic citations, but over time they develop a community with aims and characteristics similar to the other two social networks. The fact of being meant for the creation of a bibliography is a strength because citations collected from all users form an impressive database consisting of thousands and thousands of articles, and everybody can run a search on this database.
Mendeley
Very similar to Research Gate, Mendeley has worked a lot on his social feature up to the point of turning it into one of its main characteristics.
Zotero
One of the strengths of Zotero is the fact that it is open-source software. Besides being free (as well as the previous ones, at least the basic version) it has a very active community of developers who take care of the updates. It has taken less care of the community, which is limited to the "groups" function.
Bhardwaj, R. K. (2017). Academic social networking sites. Information and Learning Science, 118(5), 298-316.
All these social networks are the outcome of word of mouth between researchers. By favoring and facilitating the connection with many more colleagues than the ones that can be known through traditional means, they allow connections and comparison with their research colleagues. Word of mouth has pros and cons: flexibility with respect to the topics researched, finding answers very quickly, informal procedures. But also it shows a limit of searching only within the set composed by knowledge of the members of the community and a non-formalized control over the answers.
As about the contents, these tools raise the legal issue of getting around copyrighted publications: the technical framework of these websites allow to upload, in addition to the description of an article, paper or similar, also the full text (often a .pdf). However, these texts are not always free from licenses, instead they have already been published in journals that by contract limit their circulation. The fact that these contents get around, even if within such communities, can therefore lead to violations of licenses. Bhardwaj, R. K. (2017). Academic social networking sites. Information and Learning Science, 118(5), 298-316.