ResearchGATE and Its Savvy Use of the Web

The site links medical researchers from around the world—and is driving homegrown, locally relevant innovation in developing nations

By Steve Hamm

Ijad Madisch got the idea for ResearchGATE in 2007, when he was studying at Harvard Medical School

When Dr. Kelvin Leshabari was studying in 2008 for his medical degree in Dar Es Salaam, Tanzania, he felt isolated from medical researchers in the rest of the world. But then he stumbled upon a U.S.-based Web site, ResearchGATE, that takes the social networking concepts underlying popular services such as Facebook and LinkedIn and applies them to the research community. Leshabari, now 26, was able to connect with scientists in Germany, Israel, Canada, and the U.S. Since then, he has done collaborative research on Type II diabetes with people he found on the site and got a grant from the organizers to attend the 19th European Students' Conference, a health-care confab held in Berlin on Oct. 4-7. "This creates a bridge between scholars in developing nations like Tanzania with those in the more developed countries," says Leshabari. "It would have been almost impossible to make these connections otherwise."

The outsourcing of software programming to developing nations has been a huge boost to economic development in some of them—such as India and Costa Rica. But while Western corporations such as IBM (IBM) and GE (GE) have begun shifting scientific and medical research offshore, the activity has so far caused barely a ripple of economic impact in emerging nations. Indeed, Ijad Madisch, the co-founder and chief executive of ResearchGATE, didn't have global economic development in mind when he started the business, but the Web site is now emerging as a potentially powerful link between researchers in the richest countries and some of the poorest ones, giving promise of a wave of homegrown—and locally relevant—innovation in developing nations.

Ease of Use

Madisch, who has a medical degree and a PhD, was born in Germany to Syrian parents and lives in Boston. He got the idea for ResearchGATE when he was doing graduate work in radiology at Harvard Medical School in 2007. He was frustrated because he knew of only a half-dozen others who were working on projects related to his research into improving the resolution of medical imagery. Then he learned about a potential collaborator's research through the man's Facebook page. Madisch had experienced the power of social networking, and he decided to develop a Web site that could offer connections and collaboration tools to researchers worldwide. He launched the site in May 2008, and already 180,000 researchers from more than 200 countries are using it regularly.

One of the keys to the site's popularity and accessibility is the attention its creators have paid to navigation and ease of use. Joe Ranft, a Boston-based design consultant who helped out with the site, says an important move was publishing basic information about ResearchGATE on each of its pages, so people who found the material via a Web search understand where they have landed and are encouraged to join the community. It's also clear on the pages that membership is free, which encourages people from poor countries to join. Farhad Mirzaei, an Iranian who is a PhD candidate at the National Dairy Research Institute in Haryana, India, says he finds the site particularly useful because it's so well-organized—making it easy for researchers like him with unusual specialties to find collaborators.

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