Earlier this week, the website ResearchGATE launched its new blog page, giving its members a forum to post what they are calling “microarticles”. There are very few articles here so far, and most seem to be little more than abstracts for published studies. But the format is relatively open, inviting users both registered and unregistered to post quick-hit analysis of recent studies, such as a Hepatitis C genetic lesion discovery or gene theory that could combat color blindness.

This “MasterBLOG” is likely intended to attract users to the ResearchGATE community without the pressure of formally joining what amounts to social networking for scientists. You may or may not use Facebook or some of the other purely social sites, but few professionals these days can avoid such resources as Linked In, which helps people with their all-important networking tasks and is a tool for businesses to find and recruit qualified people.

ResearchGATE seems to fall somewhere in between. As a scientific community with an advertised 180,000-member user base, there’s no question it’s an established, professional operation. But I suspect there’s still a sizable contingent of researchers whose idea of appropriate networking is contained entirely within their Microsoft Outlook address book or in their cell phones flash memory.

Why? Well, for one, social networking has traveled a rocky road to get to this point. Internet banes like “trolls” and prospect of identity theft and an innate suspicion against sharing your personal information on a third-party website have conspired to give social networking sites of all stripes a lamprey-like reputation. All it takes is one fool to wreck a perfectly good forum. And, really, who wants to visit yet another bookmark on a daily basis, especially when work is calling?

All good arguments against the use of a site like ResearchGATE, but with the proliferation of such websites out there (yes, ours, too!), there’s something undeniably attractive about the opportunity to pick up new ideas for free on the web. It’s true that we will never really use 99% of what we learn on the Internet. But it’s that 1% that should keep even the busiest researchers coming back for more.