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May 30, 2006
Online Community Tools: Streamline and Turbocharge Your Information Retrieval
A great deal of the power of science has come from collaborations. These days collaborations increasingly begin online or convert to online when one or the other participants move to another part of the country. Technology is making these connections easier in many ways. here are just a few.
The UM Research site facilitates connections among on campus researchers.
UM Research: http://www.research.umich.edu/
UM Research recommends the Community of Science, saying, "Community of Science publishes databases useful to the research community funding opportunities, in expertise, funded research, patents, and others. UM faculty and staff may search many of these databases free-of-charge." In the Community of Science, you can enter a personal profile describing your research interests, and then subscribe to a notification service for funding announcements in those areas or browse to locate other researchers working in those topics. Very useful.
UM Research: Funding: Community of Science: http://www.research.umich.edu/funding/cos.html
Community of Science: http://www.cos.com/
There are free online comunity resources also. One specifically in dentistry is the Dental Informatics Online Community, which provides "a networking platform for people interested in DI promoting the development of dental information resources, disseminate research results and encourage the formation of research and education partnerships."
Dental Informatics Online Community: http://www.dentalinformatics.com/
Not specifically dental, there are what are becoming known as folksonomy tools -- tools for 'folk' to share information, discover what other 'folk' think is worthwhile, and who the other 'folk' are interested in the same areas as you. Folksonomy tools initially were created for the general public, and over the past few years some have become available specifically for the scientific community. Here is an article about how these are being used in the scientific and research communities.
Social Bookmarking For Scientists - The Best Of Both Worlds, by Ben Lund, Nature Publishing Group, b.lund@nature.com (XTech 2006: "Building Web 2.0" — 16-19 May 2006, Amsterdam, The Netherlands):
http://xtech06.usefulinc.com/schedule/paper/75
So let's take a closer look at how this works in practice, and what you can expect to find. Here is an example of a general purpose folksonomy tool, del.icio.us. Del.icio.us is a "social bookmarking" tool. You can put your bookmarks online, keep them private or share them, and access them from any computer with a network connection. Since del.icio.us is for the general public, its greatest strengths are in finding things of interest to lots of people. Let's see what they have for dentistry or dental.
Del.icio.us: Dental: http://del.icio.us/search/?all=dental
Now, knowing that this is not the likely place to look, let's see what they have for matrix metalloproteinases or MMPs.
Del.icio.us: Metalloproteinases: http://del.icio.us/search/?all=metalloproteinases
Now, let's compare this to what we can find in Connotea for the same topic, knowing that Connotea is for scientists and clinicians, and that it collects citations for articles, not web sites.
Connotea: Metalloproteinases: http://www.connotea.org/search?q=metalloproteinases
Connotea: MMP: http://www.connotea.org/tag/mmp
There are other scientifically focused folksonomy tools, most notably CiteULike. Let's look for MMP articles in CiteULike.
CiteULike: Metalloproteinases: http://www.citeulike.org/search/all?f=title&q=metalloproteinases
Do you like anything you saw? Just checking this topic, it looks like the MMP folk are hanging out at CiteULike, so if I was doing research in that topic, that might be a resource I'd want to start considering.
If you are thinking about using any of these tools, they are especially good to keep your favorite citations handy and accessible whenever and wherever you are. Here is a helpful tool that will allow you to send your favorite references from PubMed to either Connotea or CiteULike from within the Firefox browser. Recommended only for the truly advanced technophile (a.k.a. "geek"). If there is enough interest, I'll try to do a lunch class on this for faculty.
Pubmed2Connotea / Pumed2CiteULike:
http://www.urbigene.com/pubmed2connotea/
Want to know more about Folksonomy and folksonomy tools?
Wikipedia: Folksonomy: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folksonomy
Posted by pfa at May 30, 2006 07:38 PM