Meet Scholabrate: the social network for academics

Navigating academia can be a hard journey. Often notoriety and the right publicity is what gets most scholars their standing and positions today. Many academics find themselves at a loss when it comes to finding the proper tools to network with their peers and get noticed within their community. Academic Social Networks (ASNs), as we know them, are just libraries of published papers that focus only on encouraging researchers to upload their work, nothing more. Some are only about career networking while other just focused on publishing and research. This shifts the spotlight away from the individual and the full equation that encompasses the academic. Their online presence is weakened and their ability to play a greater role within the academic community is stunted.

Seeing this gap in academia, Dr. Aviv Pichhadze was inspired to create a platform that could give scholars the ability to showcase their talents. In creating Scholabrate, a networking platform for academics that works to solve the problems they are facing, Dr. Pichhadze addresses the lack of personal praise and networking. This helps the scholars create their own online brand while establishing their credibility and recognition in academia. Scholabrate has colorful icons and interactive dashboards that work to maximize the scholar’s journey, all the while simultaneously advancing their careers. The platform bridges the gap between research, collaboration, and networking by giving the academics back their power.

Many well known academic social networks offer profile pages and uploading options for published works, but they do little to show the complete story and background that encompasses each scholar. Career oriented social networks are based solely on networking and uploading CV’s. They do little to showcase academic works and research publications. ASN’s need to evolve to encompass all that a scholar needs in order to collaborate, showcase their works and give the full picture that they so desperately need.

Giving scholars a chance to shine is key in the implementation of ASNs. Scholabrate highlights all of their training endorsements, mentorships, internships, research and more, making all the insights into their academic works and career readily available. For the instant messaging millennial, Scholaborate’s internal chat system, ScholaTeam, allows the young academic the ability to network and collaborate in real time using video, file libraries, and other great features freeing up their time to work on more important things, like research and studies.

Networking and collaborating with your peers is key to making it in academia today. The future of ASNs needs to provide the academic community with the right tools in order to assist them in keeping up with the rest of the social media networking world. User-friendly and interactive platforms are the future when it comes to expanding academics’ professional circles. These will give scholars on all levels the opportunities to meet and collaborate with fellow academics in their fields, as well as in other fields, that they wouldn’t have had the chance to connect with otherwise.