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In the past few years, academia-specific social networking websites have grown in popularity among faculty members at universities across the United States.

These websites, including Academia.edu, Zotero.org and several others, offer new and efficient ways for scholars and students to share research and find colleagues who share their interests. Similar to Facebook and Twitter, these websites allow academics to follow updates in colleagues work and research while sharing their own.

While a majority of students and faculty may place more faith in sharing work through academic journals and other tried-and-true peer reviews, the time efficiency offered by digital publishing on growing academic social networks may entice more users to join in the future.

Some might be concerned that edits made to papers shared online tend to have less depth than those made in academic journals.

Yet in spite of apparent shortfalls in the quality of digital publishing, the open communication and socialization offered by these new websites retain promise for students searching for potential peers and newer research in their fields of interests.

Academia.edu alone has more than 1.3 million users, 3,685 of whom are affiliated with UCLA.

Christine Borgman, the presidential chair and a professor of information studies, is one of many professors at UCLA who have used these websites in their courses.

Borgman said students in one of her advanced graduate seminars participate in a Zotero group to pool their works as a group and to track one anothers research interests.

The use of these websites by faculty members and students, however, does not counteract the risks of using social networking websites. With general social networks like Facebook, the ability to share personal or professional information does not include the ability to choose who has access to that information.

This concern for privacy, however, is not an essential issue for academic websites, as content posted by users is typically related to their studies and set in a more professional tone than might be expected on more general interest networking websites such as Facebook. Furthermore, this content is usually only viewed by faculty and students in the same field.

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Social researching: Academia-specific networking websites offer new, efficient ways for scholars to connect, share works