We’ve made some changes to Topics based on your feedback.

You can now search through a topic to find the discussions you’re looking for. Just enter your keywords into the search bar to the right of the topic page - it’s that simple.

Please keep your suggestions coming, we love hearing from you.

“For colorimetric detection in WB, is it best to use AP or HRP conjugated?”
“Does anyone know a good way of isolating membrane proteins in their native form?” 
“Which is the best method for pattern matching: Back Propagation, Genetic Algorithm or Cluster Algorithm?”

Since the launch of ResearchGate, you’ve been using ‘Groups’ to get answers to a lot of complicated questions. Knowing how valuable this resource has become, we decided that it was time to build on it. The result is ‘Topics’ - a more community-driven way to discuss your work - and we think you’re going to like it.

How does Topics work?

1) Follow topics that match your research interests
And see useful articles, publications, links and other content contributed by your peers.

2) Ask a question
To discuss your work with those in the know.

3) Share something
And let other researchers in on what’s informing your work.

4) Rate posts according to quality
To make sure that the most helpful contributions are seen first.

Some extra information:

• If you’re a member of a public group, we’ll make sure you’re following the corresponding topic. But don’t stop there, you can follow as many as you want.
• Private and Secure Groups will become ‘Workgroups’, so you’ll be able to continue working with your colleagues in an exclusive environment, just as before.
• You can use the main search bar to find topics and discussions, but don’t hesitate to ‘Create a Topic’ if you think there’s anything missing.
• If you are the administrator of a group, you’ll be given the role of curator - so as well helping to keep Topics organised, you’ll have more of a say when it comes to rating posts and comments.

Over the coming weeks we’ll be working on ironing out all kinds of kinks - and we’d really appreciate your help. We base our updates on your feedback, so please let us know if you have any suggestions or comments.

Profiles represent people: this is why the new ResearchGate profile was designed with you in mind. 

Start with yourself:

Your profile is where it all begins: add a photo and then let people know where you work, what your research interests are and how they can get in touch with you.  Add a few more details about your educational background, skills, grants and conferences to round out your online research resume.

To improve navigation throughout the site, we’ve now enhanced our search engi ne and launched suggestion based search. Just start typing in a name or a scientific keyword and you’ll instantly receive a selection of profiles, groups, events and jobs matching your query. Here’s an example:

Click here to start searching

To increase the ability to search for and connect with researchers with related interests and fields, ResearchGATE profiles now feature hyperlinks for all fields on the 'About Me' page. 

This feature allows you to click on a single word or term, such as a specific institution or research area, and see the results of other profiles in the community that match your search term. 

We hope this feature will increase the efficiency and accessibility of making new contacts, or even just to see who is involved in what field or who has a specific skill set.

As always, we welcome any feedback or ideas you have.

ResearchGATE has now made it easier to integrate all of your social media platforms by allowing you to log in to your profile with either your Facebook, LinkedIN, FriendFeed, or Twitter accounts. 

You can widen the impact of your ResearchGATE activity, such as sharing your publication or mini-feeds, with your contacts from these other networks. 

The development of the ResearchGATE community and the services we provide depends on your feedback so we can continue to offer researchers and scientists like you the best possible platform. 

We welcome your feedback and ideas as we continue to grow.

To enable you to broadcast your ResearchGATE updates to other networks and import status updates from other networks, we have connected the ResearchGATE feed to other network feeds: Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and FriendFeed can now be connected to your profile. You have control over each individual connector of whether you want to export or import updates. Single status updates retrieved from other networks can be also deleted from your home feed. If you know of other networks, which we should support as a network connector to Researchgate, please contact us. 

Your feedback is invaluable to us, and we always welcome your ideas and feedback. We are looking forward to hearing from you.

The concept of 'following' was introduced to ResearchGATE. To 'follow' a member in the ResearchGATE community means that you will receive updates on various aspects of the their activity such as status updates, when they upload a full-text paper, and comments they make in discussions. Of course this goes both ways, and other members will be able to follow you as well and keep up-to-date with your activity. You will have full control over what is included in your 'follow' updates, which can be accessed under the settings tab on your profile.

Over the past 2 weeks we have launched several new features in ResearchGATE - more is on the way, but I'd like to describe the newly launched features in detail for now.

Microblogging

The first big change is the implementation of a scientific microblog format within the ResearchGATE network. Feedback we were receiving from the community was quite unanimous: Having a microblogging tool connected to other services as Facebook or Linkedin would be highly beneficial. Therefore, we invested a lot of time in designing this feature, which is located on your homepage. The center of it is the status update, which allows you to share news, links, publications, and more with your ResearchGATE network and gives you the option to share with other networks such as Facebook and FriendFeed.

Homepage Design

We've also updated the layout of your homepage. Now you can also see the activity of your network such as when someone joins a group you are a member of, or if someone comments on one of your posts. Group discussions are an important part of ResearchGATE and they have their own tab within this new feature. Clicking on the discussion tab gives you a fast and easy overview of current discussions in the groups you are a member of.


Boston, Germany – April 20, 2010 – ResearchGATE, the largest social network for scientists and researchers, today introduced a series of new features to make it easier for scientists to share, stay connected and learn from each other online. Users of ResearchGATE can now enable micoblogging on their profile to keep their connections up to date on their latest work and subscribe to updates from other scientists in their network. Microblogging feeds from Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn can be consolidated on ResearchGATE to give users a holistic view. Members can also effortlessly share documents, data or experiment information so that scientists can work smarter together and learn from previous experiments. “The key to making information accessible to the scientists that need it is making it easy for other scientists to publish that information. This way experiments, data and measurements can finally cease to be repeated hundreds of times around the globe and we can make greater strides in new discoveries,” said Ijad Madisch, co-founder and CEO of ResearchGATE.  

As one of the many requested features, ResearchGATE now supports COinS (ContextObjects in Spans). COinS is an open and easy to use specification for publishing OpenURL bibliographic metadata in HTML. On web pages, embedded COinS can be read and processed by applications. A COinS section is embedded in each of our publication pages. This means that other bookmarklets can extract and process the information from ResearchGATE’s publication pages.The addition of COinS to ResearchGATE will allow scientists and researchers to access their colleagues journal publications through their own library subscriptions. A growing number of tools including Zotero and LibX are supporting COinS." said Eric Hellmann, editor of the COinS specification.Thanks for your feedback and we are looking forward to your next ideas.

At the moment our job board has more than 900 jobs from various international top research institutions. To stay up to date about newest research jobs, we introduced an RSS Feed that's plugged inside our international Job Board.Subscribe to it and stay informed about latest research jobs!

We added a tiny feature, which was requested from numerous ResearchGATE members: Now, you can view the number of pending contact requests and cancel pending requests from your contact list. Thanks again for your valuable feedback.

In order to help make personal ResearchGATE blogs more user friendly, we have added a 'Preview Post' function that allows you to see what your post will look like before you publish. This function is extremely useful when you have inserted things like images or graphs into your post, as you can make sure everything appears exactly as you want.

Thanks again for your valuable feedback.

Based on the valuable feedback from ResearchGATE members, we have updated the information on profile pages to include fields for listing current and past advisors, which are available under the 'Personal Information' section. 

 We have also added a field to add Twitter details under the 'Contact' details section.

Thanks again for your valuable feedback.