To improve our network by initiating or strengthening our collaborations, the Young Crystallographers started a so called lab on ResearchGate. Follow the lab and its projects to get in touch with other Young Crystallographers, find mentors, and ask questions you always wanted to be answered!

ResearchGate

ResearchGate itself is something like facebook, but for scientists. You present your academic stations instead of places you lived, you share articles and data instead of photos, and you can join working projects instead of interest groups. Another great feature is that you can characterize yourself as a scientist by adding keywords of your preferred research, e.g. XRD or life science. Additionally, you can ask questions to your peers and get first impressions of a new scientific field.

Create and Personalize an Account

To create an account on ResearchGate you need an email address of a scientific institution. Everything else is self-explanatory, starting from editing your institute/department over adding skills and expertise to confirming authorship of suggested articles.

After the successful creation you can add many more information about yourself and your research. All information you give, help to create a strong profile of you as a scientist. Other researchers can confirm your expertise and skill and thus help to improve your reputation. Additionally, you can share your research there: not only manuscripts (for this often archives are used) but also posters and thesis (bachelor, master, etc.)

Another cool feature is that you can ask all other ResearchGate members questions and get answers from the experts in the field.

However, most important is – of course – to follow our lab!

(Note: you can only be a collaborator of one lab, so if your boss has a ResearchGate account and manages a lab, better only follow us to stay up to date!)

The Lab

By following our lab Young Crystallographers of the DGK you become a part of a growing network of young academics. On the one hand, we aim to give the 1st year PhD students (and younger) a possibility to find mentors and advisors outside their working groups. On the other hand, we want the more experienced scientists to share their wisdom.

To give this lab a structure, we created several projects for the different fields using crystallography. Simply follow the ones that suit you the most and we will add you as a collaborator. Subsequently you can add your research there and gain more visibility. We will misuse the Project Log for asking „internal“ questions. So, if you don’t want the whole world to see your „dumb“ question, ask it here and it will stay in a group of understanding and considerate peers. I will start with some questions I am really interested in (1 and 2) and I hope to get many creative answers!

The project Young Crystallographers is for general information about our working group and is thus certainly interesting for all of you.

Help us improve!

The original idea was to create a digital network for Crystallographers where they can find mentors and peers in their field of research and to provide some kind of forum, where questions can be asked and answered. However, such a forum only for the DGK already existed but died very quickly as the overall usage for every member was too small.

By using ResearchGate, we hope that the existing infrastructure would reduce the amount of work and increase your interest as you perhaps already have an account or you think that having an account could be useful even aside from our lab.

Please keep in mind that the workgroup Young Crystallographers of the DGK is perhaps the first working group/society to manage a ResearchGate account. At the moment, essential functions are missing to organize it properly. Thus, we need to strongly improvise to give you a platform that can support you. We are still in the test phase. So please be patient with us and send us all your ideas to improve the lab. We are also happy if some of you would administer the different projects including to add new members and to look after the netiquette while asking and answering questions.