Scientists are developing algorithms that can connect researchers across the world who have similar interests by scanning the content of academic papers.
Researchers at TEAM, an EU-funded project, are using algorithms to quantify the extent to which scientific papers cover similar ground, and are looking at ways to profile scientists by the documents they have searched for. They are also developing technology that can facilitate searches of research papers. (...) - by Peter O'Donnell, in Horizon, 05 August 2013
Via Tree of Science
I really think that social media and other tools to research and dig out data from the network will change the Academia and Research world.
We wait for this change (and push).