Scholarly Networking outside the institution

Most of ConnectedWorks has been considering how scholarly networking applies within a university. In particular, how researchers create and maintain their online profiles, and how they find and connect to each other.

But scholars work with each other within disciplines across institutions too - these ties may be as meaningful, or more so, as the connections within a university.  We can imagine a vision (which is nearly here) where a researcher is a member of his university's scholarly network, so he can connect to other local scholars, and also a member of a discipline-oriented scholarly network, perhaps provided by his learned society.  This means that the researcher can connect to others who work in his university as well as scholars nationally or internationally in his field.  Nonetheless, this isn't a perfect setup; the researcher has to make two online profiles and log on to two separate systems, etc. For an early career researcher, who might be changing institutions every couple of years (or more frequently), through Masters and PhD degrees and short term post doc contracts, the network with scholars worldwide may be more important.

So ConnectedWorks has been looking into the prospects for scholarly networks organised by discipline, potentially by learned or professional societies. We've been lucky enough to have the chance to learn from the American Academy of Religion, who have been looking into scholarly networking, and we're now publishing our research report [PDF] - Scholarly Networking in the Learned Society, by Helen Burchmore, Anne-Sophie de Baets, and Laura James.

World of reference managers

We are preparing the next phase of project research work, which is investigating what reference managers are used here in Cambridge, and the attitudes of researchers and academics to various reference manager features or potential future features. 

Part of this research will be a survey, and we've been thinking about questions over the last couple of weeks. There's a lot of things we want to find out about, whilst keeping the questionnaire short enough that academics are happy to complete it.

One obvious question is: what reference managers do you use? And we'e got a list of ones we know about to put in as options. If you know of any more, please let us know in the comments...

• Papers
• EndNote
• Mendeley
• Zotero
• qiqqa
• iCite
• JabRef
• RefWorks 
• Paperpile
• BibTeX
• Own computer-based system, such as an Excel spreadsheet
• Own paper system
• Other (please specify)

As well as finding out which of these (and it might well be more than one!) people use, we have questions in other categories too - at least, in our draft questionnaire - we might need to slim it down. Again, if there are other things you think we should ask the good scholars of Cambridge, please post in the comments!

1. About you - career stage, subject area, level of collaboration in your research
2. Level of usage of "web2" tools and other technology
3. Level of comfort and practice sharing aspects of research
4. What reference managers you use
5. What you use reference managers for (eg. formatting citations, storing papers to read later, finding out what others are reading)
6. Whether you use any of the "social" aspects of reference managers, such as sharing papers with a group
7. How you choose reference managers (feature lists, price, provision by institution, use by peers, training or support availability, long term sustainability of the tool, etc)