Eliciting essential requirements for social networks in academic environments

Recent years have witnessed the generation of online social networking web sites, in which millions of members publicly articulate mutual friendship relations and share user-created contents. But it is just a few years that we have seen some efforts to create special social networks to be used in academic environments. Considering the increasing needs for this kind of web sites, we did a comprehensive survey on more than 20 academic social networks for gathering and categorizing the essential requirements for this kind of web sites. Hence, having some good experiences by creating the Iranian Experts Social Network with more than 120,000 official members, in this paper we try to clarify the features of Social Networks in academic environments and propose a category for their requirements.