How Mailchimp uses network analysis

December 3, 2012 by Leave a comment

An example of Mailchimp mailing list clustering by readership overlap — “Fantasy sports! Guns! And flowers, for what I can only assume are apologies for doing something stupid with the first two.”

I sometimes forget what a powerful tool network analysis is. Mailchimp, a popular email newsletter provider, used several standard network analysis tools to look at subscribers to mailing lists using their platform, to calculate similarities between both subscribers and lists.

Read more:

Filed under Research Networking, Social Networking, Visualizations

Enhance your research networking platform, the UCSF way

November 8, 2012 by

Golden Gate Bridge

CTSI at UCSF has invested in increasing the usage and usability of UCSF Profiles, our research networking system. Based on our presentation at the 2012 IKFC meeting, here are our top 5 technical tips on how to increase the impact of your institution’s investment in research networking platforms, based on our past three years of work.

1. Measure

You can’t understand how you’re doing without measuring usage.

  • Install Google Analytics, then learn how to use this incredibly powerful tool (make sure to segment on-campus vs. off-campus traffic by setting up advanced segments based on service provider)
  • Register your site on Google Webmaster Tools to understand how search engines see your data

2. Optimize for search engines

UCSF Profiles gets over 50,000 visits a month. 72% of that traffic comes from search engines, primarily Google. Here’s how to increase traffic from search engines:

  • Implement a sitemap containing links to all your people profile pages, and make sure Google sees it using Google Webmaster Tools
  • Add a readable meta description (e.g. “Jane Doe’s profile, publications, research topics, and co-authors”) to your profile pages so they look better in search engine results
  • Add Schema.org data about your people on people profile pages
  • Advanced: use rel=canonical to prevent different versions of the same content from being indexed

3. Build inbound links

Linking is a critical way to both increase site traffic, and to signal importance to search engines.

  • Get websites large and small at your institution to link to your site (two years after launch, there are over 100 websites at UCSF that link to one or more pages on Profiles)
  • Encourage heavy linking to individual profile pages, e.g. from the campus directory, news articles, departmental profiles

4. Reuse data

Your research profiling system comes with APIs. Encouraging campus-wide reuse of this data can increase the impact of your investment. See opendata.profiles.ucsf.edu to see how UCSF is marketing this data.

  • Learn how to use your system’s APIs, so you can share that experience with others
  • Publicly document how the APIs work, and include sample source code
  • Reach out to campus technologists and webmasters to demonstrate how easy it is for them to reuse your data (e.g. the inclusion of Profiles data in UCSF’s mobile app was the result of technologist outreach)
  • Reach out to campus leaders to show them what kind of efficiencies they can gain by reusing your data (e.g. the inclusion of links to researcher profiles on the UCSF Directory was the result of a strategic partnership)

5. Extend with ORNG (advanced)

ORNG (OpenSocial Research Networking Gadgets) is a plugin system that allows you to add new apps into instances of Profiles or VIVO. Apps are written in HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, and are easy to share and reuse.

  • Install ORNG (OpenSocial) into your copy of Profiles or VIVO
  • Add new apps from the ORNG library of free apps
  • Write your own apps — most JavaScript programmers can get started in hours

Good luck! Feel free to leave comments and questions on this post—we’re happy to share what we know.

P.S. Thinking about how to make your campus equipment/services more discoverable? Try UCSF’s Plumage, the open source platform behind UCSF Cores Search.

Photo credit: digitonin via photopin cc

Filed under Profiles Research Networking Software, Research Networking, UCSF Profiles

Leveraging the Social Web for Research Networking

August 20, 2012 by

Five Questions with CTSI Technical Architect Eric Meeks About the Benefits of OpenSocial 

This article highlights…

  • …what OpenSocial is and how it can help advance research networking, 
  • …what institutions interested in using OpenSocial should keep in mind,
  • …what the Clinical and Translational Science Institute (CTSI) at UCSF has done to promote OpenSocial in academia and to build a community of developers and supporters,
  • …and how the business sector can tap into this emerging market.

Eric Meeks has worked for numerous startups in Silicon Valley including Ning, one of the first social network systems to support OpenSocial. Since 2009, he has been the lead technical architect for the Clinical & Translational Science Institute (CTSI) at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), the first academic biomedical institution using OpenSocial in an open source research networking product. He is also a founder of the Open Research Network Gadgets (ORNG).

Q: OpenSocial is built upon the idea that ‘the web is better when it’s social’. It encourages developers to build standardized web applications that can be shared across different social networking platforms. How can academia and biomedical research benefit from OpenSocial?

If you look at the topography of all the different research institutions, many of them run different back-end systems, from Windows to Linux, Oracle to MySQL to SQL Server, and all with custom data models. Despite differences in our underlying systems, however, we’re becoming very common in that we deploy research networking systems to help investigators find and connect with one another. Some systems are based on Profiles, some on VIVO, some are custom like LOKI, CAP, or Digital Vita. As much as we want to share new features and applications to extend these systems, it’s really difficult to do that because the applications are hard-coded and tailored to our specific institutional databases. As a consequence, many applications are rebuilt for the various systems. OpenSocial allows us to change that.

By agreeing upon a solution that is standardized by a large community, we can agree upon a way for sharing these things. We can build one version, share it amongst everybody, and be more cost-effective. In other words, implementing OpenSocial makes applications interoperable with any social network system that supports them. Academic research institutions can use OpenSocial to open up their websites so that multiple people can add new features and applications and they can all do it at the same time, and independently of one another. ‘A platform beats an application every time,’ as O’Reilly Media put it. I see that as extremely powerful. It’s the only way I see to solve the problem that we have with different institutions deploying different research networking tools.

Q: What are some of the ways that the social web and OpenSocial are relevant to academia?

In research as in in other areas of life, communication and collaboration are supported by relationships. At their core, research networking systems are similar to social networking systems like Facebook, LinkedIn or Ning. They are showing a researcher’s expertise and how researchers are connected to each other.

The difference is that the social ‘friend’ in an academic network is embellished with different attributes such as co-authorship, mentorship, and shared areas of research. Research networking systems were created to leverage and enhance these academic relationships.

Q: You lead the OpenSocial efforts at UCSF’s Clinical and Translational Science Institute. How would you describe your work to improve research networking?

We’re working with researchers and administrators to identify needs for applications that are appropriate for research networking tools. The gadgets that we have developed are intended to fill some of the gaps that exist. They allow individuals to update their research profile by adding presentations hosted at SlideShare, data that indicates an interest in mentoring, and relevant web links. Gadgets also make it easy to export publications in different formats from any profile, and help users build lists of people based on common attributes like research interests. And finally, a more generic Google Search gadget broadens the existing Profiles search to include free-text fields like the profile narrative and awards. All of these applications are available to any institution that wants to utilize them. (See the full gadget library.) It is our hope that our library of free gadgets will grow as more institutions join the OpenSocial community.

Right now, we’re in the process of building the community, which also means that the first members of this community don’t really get to benefit from it, but that’s changing. Wake Forest University, for example, has adopted OpenSocial and is using one of our applications. But they also built their own applications and made them available for free. Andy Bowline, Programmer at Wake Forest University, created a gadget that matches NIH reporter grant data with researchers’ profiles to identify grants that may be appropriate for a researcher to look into. Andy reached out to the NIH OER Grant Search team and got permission to scrape their website on a daily basis. The gadget grabs the data and throws them into a search engine. It also talks to the web service that Andy built on top of that to find matching grants. Andy not only shared the gadget that does this, but they also allow us to use their web services. That’s exactly what we want to see. We’re not competing. On the contrary, we’re trying to do the same thing. By using OpenSocial we can do it together.

Most excitingly, our OpenSocial code is becoming an official part of both the Profiles and the VIVO products. We have been working with both developer teams of both products supporting OpenSocial in our development environment. It’s great to see the same gadgets running in both of these two different systems, especially when you consider that the technology stacks between the two products couldn’t be more different.  Profiles runs on Microsoft technologies while VIVO runs on Java.  However, since they are both supporting OpenSocial, those differences don’t matter; the gadgets run in either environment without alteration.

Q: What tips do you have for academic institutions interested in adopting OpenSocial? 

There are a few things. I think it is helpful to have internal discussions with your development team and web strategy leaders to discuss how existing applications could be repurposed in a research networking site. Not all applications are suited for this type of deployment of course, but for some it may be the best way to make sure that these applications are seen and used.

OpenSocial is a huge API. I recommend integrating with Apache Shindig, which is the reference standard for OpenSocial. It shows you in ‘living code’ what an OpenSocial website should do and it also serves as a library to make your website OpenSocial compliant. LinkedIn, Google, Nature Networks and others are using it.

I also recommend taking advantage of the applications we already developed to help save time and money. We’re giving out both the applications and the code we use to convert our website to be OpenSocial-enabled, which lowers the technical bar quite a bit. It’s easy to apply the code in a few days.

Another important lesson that we learned is the need to prepare for managing expectations and overcoming political hurdles. OpenSocial is extremely powerful, but as with any technology, it doesn’t do everything and it does require some amount of technical investment.

It is also helpful for interested groups to know that we have combined OpenSocial with the Resource Definition Framework (RDF) standard that is core to VIVO and can now also be found in Profiles and LOKI. RDF is a component of the semantic web and Linked Open Data. When applications support RDF it is much easier for them to share data. As a matter of fact, the CTSA network recommends that institutions use VIVO compatible RDF within their research networking tools so that all of our data can be accessed more easily. With OpenSocial, we are able to use VIVO RDF to expose much richer data to our gadgets than the OpenSocial specification originally allowed. This is a great win and allows us to build gadgets that are very specific to our biomedical researcher needs without having to sacrifice interoperability.

If your institution uses a product like VIVO or Profiles that you think would benefit from being OpenSocial, we definitely want to hear from you, because we want to make sure that we have the same flavor of OpenSocial across our products that are truly interoperable. And, consider joining our new initiative called Open Research Networking Gadgets (ORNG), pronounced “orange.”

Q: Originally, OpenSocial was designed by corporations such as Google and MySpace Google for social network applications. While OpenSocial is seeing wider adoption in enterprise companies, that adoptions has been slower in the academic biomedical arena. What would you like to see from the business sector?

I would like for industry to recognize that there is an emerging market here that they can tap into. It’s a market that has a lot of value, a lot of social benefit, and a lot of wonderful brands behind it such as UCSF, Harvard, and Cornell. This is the kind of work that industry should be proud to be a part of, and they can convert that into a marketing message. I also want industry to know that we would like to work with them.

What we don’t want is for OpenSocial to drift off into some area where it’s dominated by the entertainment or finance industry and no longer viable to science and academia. The OpenSocial Foundation is a main driver in this respect, and they are eager for adoption by people and institutions working in the health sciences. The Open Social Foundation is much more targeted at collaboration and productivity as opposed to entertainment.

Q: What’s your vision for OpenSocial at UCSF and for academia in general? 

A standard only has value when it has adoption across multiple platforms, so we want to promote it and build a community. We also want to be a part of that community to be able to share the benefits of the networking effect. Right now research networking systems only give us a hint of what they’re capable of doing. People today are using these platforms to find out about one another, and even this is happening in a limited sense. People should be using these platforms not just to find out about one another, but to interact and get things done. That’s what people are doing with LinkedIn, Facebook, etc. With a strong OpenSocial community we can advance and extend current research networking systems much faster and cheaper to give researchers and administrators the opportunity to be hyper-connected and hopefully more productive.

This Q&A is part of “Digital Media & Science: A Perspectives Series from CTSI at UCSF” moderated by Katja Reuter, PhD, associate director of communications for CTSI. This series explores how digital media and communications can be used to advance science and support academia. 

Original post on CTSI at UCSF

Filed under Collaboration Tools, CTSI at UCSF, OpenSocial, Research Networking Tagged with , , , , , , , , , ,

Social Networks for Academics Proliferate, Despite Some Scholars Doubts

May 2, 2012 by

Here’s an article with an overview of online products out there for research social networking;  the big gap in the article is that no institutional products are included such as Profiles, VIVO, etc. This is noted in one of the comments at the end, by Titus Schleyer.

That aside, there are interesting opinions in this piece, a few clipped below, and perhaps pointing to the current status of the space,  where the sweet spot has not yet been found.  

“After six years of running Zotero, it’s not clear that there is a whole lot of social value to academic social networks,” says Sean Takats, the site’s director, who is an assistant professor of history at George Mason University. “Everyone uses Twitter, which is an easy way to pop up on other people’s radar screens without having to formally join a network.” 

Scholars aren’t interested in sharing original ideas on such sites, [Christopher Blanchard, an adjunct professor of community and regional planning at Boise State University] now believes, “because they’re afraid they’ll be ripped off” and because they simply don’t have the time.

“We have thousands of new discussions taking place every day—scientists helping scientists without getting anything for it,” [Dr. Madisch, of ResearchGate] says. “Three years ago, people were smiling at me and saying that scientists aren’t social. They won’t share information. They were wrong.”

Social Networks for Academics Proliferate, Despite Some Scholars Doubts – Technology – The Chronicle of Higher Education.

Filed under Collaboration Tools, Profiles Research Networking Software, Research Networking, Research Tools, Researcher Profiles, Social Networking, Twitter, UCSF Profiles

AMIA 2012 Joint Summit: a report back in tweets

March 23, 2012 by 3 Comments

Eric, Leslie, and I from CTSI at UCSF’s Virtual Home team spent the past three days at the AMIA 2012 Joint Summit in San Francisco.

Here’s some of what was happening on the researcher networking, social networking, knowledge representation fronts, and public search front, via Twitter:

Other tweets that caught my eye from the rest of the conference:

Filed under Collaboration Tools, Research Networking, Research Tools, Researcher Profiles, Search, Social Media, Social Networking, Translational Research, Twitter, UCSF Profiles

Measuring total scholarly impact, beyond the cite

December 16, 2011 by 1 Comment

The new Total-Impact tool takes a series of references to someone’s work (e.g. publications, Slideshare slides, URLs, Github or Mendeley accounts) and generates reports based on a wide variety of impact metrics. It starts with traditional citations, but adds in bookmarks (from Mendeley, Delicious, etc.), mentions (on Twitter, Facebook), downloads (from publishers’ websites).

Check out some examples:

It’s fun seeing the various metrics. Chad, for example, has work cited on Wikipedia, and read on Mendeley:

This 2011 entry from Clay’s report doesn’t appear to have any cites from PubMed, but shows interest and activity from a variety of sources, including the PLoS website, CrossRef, CiteYouLike, and Mendeley. Some of his papers have even been discussed on Facebook!

Read more:

Filed under Open Science, Research Networking, Researcher Profiles, Social Media

Collaboration Success Wizard — want to test to see if your geographically distributed team is poised for success?

December 1, 2011 by 1 Comment

Collaboration Success Wizard.

Check this out … looks really interesting!

Here’s the description from the site:

Once a project is approved to participate [to use the Wizard], we send invitation e-mails to all the project members. The Wizard is an online survey that takes about 30 minutes. Each individual involved in the project should take the survey independently. The more project members who take the survey, the better the data!

And yes – it’s free!

At the end of the survey each participant can see a personalized individual report that contains feedback based on their answers and our research. This report is available immediately, and summarizes both the strong points and the issues at risk for the target collaboration.

Filed under Collaboration Tools, Innovation Management, Process Improvement, Research Networking, Research Tools, Team Science

Using Research Networking Effectively in Academia: UCSF-CTSI Team Presents On National AMIA Panel

October 27, 2011 by

Three of us from the Virtual Home team at CTSI went to this year’s AMIA (American Medical Informatics Assoc) meeting in DC and presented on a panel with Griffin Weber of Harvard University. The panel was called “Four Steps to Using Research Networking Effectively at Your Institution”

Griffin spoke on cutting edge features of research networking tools, such as linked open data and social network analysis.

Eric Meeks of UCSF spoke on standard APIs, such as OpenSocial, to leverage a community of developers, I spoke about incentivize usage and understand your audience, and to round it out, Brian Turner spoke about using data, tools and strangers to improve user interfaces.

The panel presentation was a 90 minute break out session and we were happy to have a good turnout and an engaged audience. I think that the work that UCSF has put into the ‘social engineering’ of the tool has really paid off. Our usage and engagement numbers are on the rise and comparatively speaking, Griffin mentioned that our traffic is about 5-times that of what Harvard Profiles is currently getting.

In addition, Eric also had a poster session at the meeting!

The UCSF presentations will be up on Slideshare, available on the CTSI channel and via our individual UCSF profiles:

http://profiles.ucsf.edu/ProfileDetails.aspx?From=SE&Person=5333232
http://profiles.ucsf.edu/ProfileDetails.aspx?From=SE&Person=4621800
http://profiles.ucsf.edu/ProfileDetails.aspx?From=SE&Person=5333232

Filed under Collaboration Tools, Communications, Crowdsourcing, OpenSocial, Profiles Research Networking Software, Research Networking, Researcher Profiles, Social Networking, UCSF Profiles, Web Analytics, Web Design, Web Development Tagged with , , , , ,

Social Capital in Networks

September 27, 2011 by

After working on a grant proposal with Tanu Malik and others at UChicago (and others at UCSF), Tanu found an interesting blog on Social Capital in Networks.  Interesting posts.

Social Capital in Networks.

 

Filed under Research Networking, Social Media, Social Networking Tagged with ,

Google Scholar Citations – an easy way to get citation metrics into UCSF Profiles?

August 4, 2011 by 3 Comments

Recently Google launched Google Scholar Citations: a simple way for you to compute your citation metrics and track them over time, per this blog post.

I went in to check it out on July 25, 2011 and ‘signed up’ – and here’s what I found. NOTE: apparently this is a limited launch with a small number of users, so if you can’t sign up, you can provide your email address to be notified when they open it up to everyone.

1. I went to: http://scholar.google.com/citations?view_op=new_profile

2. I logged into my Google account and then followed their 4 step process of claiming my citation profile. Here are the steps:

3. Step 1 was creating the Google scholar Profile – this entailed putting in my name, title, institution email address. (sorry no screen shot).

4. Step 2 is to import “Your articles.” The system automatically shows me what it found and then I went in to “claim” which articles were mine. Once I click the “This is mine” button next to every article that is mine, the button changes to “Remove” (if I want to change my mind). A few notes here:

a. The Google search found my articles in PubMed, and also some patent applications, but I know I had one article that isn’t it PubMed and this one was not found.

b. It was easy for me to claim my articles as I only had 3 items. For people with hundreds of articles to claim, I’m not sure how easy they make it to claim your work.

5. Step 3 is to configure your updates for Google scholar

6. Step 4 – Go to view your profile, which is private by default. Change this to public if you want others to find it (and if you want to create a link to it from your UCSF Profile)

Clicking on a specific article gets you to:

7. If you’ve made your Google Scholar Profile public, you can grab this Google URL and easily create a link to citation metrics in your UCSF Profile. Log in to UCSF Profiles and edit the Websites associated with your profile. See a screenshot of mine below, or view it live.

We’ve got some other ideas on how this work can intersect with UCSF Profiles and our work with research networking tools … in more robust ways than this. But in less than 10 minutes, I was able to do the above.

Filed under Profiles Research Networking Software, Research Networking, Research Tools, UCSF Profiles

LabLife.org – A Model for a Future Research Portal at CTSI, and perhaps even UCSF?

July 5, 2011 by 2 Comments

This site is interesting because it helps researchers perform a variety of tasks and supports their online community. At the same time, it provides clear paths to access more information without overwhelming the user. And btw, the goal of the site is easily comprehensible.

LabLife is free for academic labs. We recently learned that UCSF postdocs are using it frequently. And they’re not the only ones, according to LabLife over 1800 labs from 1200 institutions world-wide are using the site.

Here are a few examples how the site supports several aspects of a researcher’s lab life:

  • searching for products,
  • coordinating purchases (preventing ordering mistakes),
  • managing (tracking) reagents, documents, and data,
  • searching for jobs and publications, and
  • sharing information with colleagues and the community.

What do you think?

Filed under Collaboration Tools, Communications, Process Improvement, Research Networking, Social Networking

Industry embraces the semantic web! Just like us, only different….

June 10, 2011 by

Google, Bing!, and Yahoo announced an initiative on June 2, 2011 to create Schema.org, a web site that will promote standard ways of adding machine readable (semantic) data to all of our web pages.  As a validation of the semantic web, this is great news.

However, they are supporting a different format for exposing semantic data than what we use in biomedical informatics, so what does that mean for our way of doing things?  More specifically, we have become proponents of RDFa as the “serialization format” for exposing our semantic data. RDFa is how VIVO exposes semantic data, it’s how the future versions (and current Harvard version) of Profiles will expose semantic data, and it’s intrinsically tied to our support of machine readable ontologies such as vivo and foaf.

Schema.org will support a different serialization format known as “microdata”.  Some are seeing this as the possible death of RDFa: http://graveshow.com/blog/tutorials/web-design/death-rdfa.  Others are not sure if it is a threat or opportunity: http://bnode.org/blog/2011/06/06/schema-org-threat-or-opportunity.  At least one person thinks this is actually good for RDFa: http://planet.linkeddata.org/.  The schema.org creators are aware of the controversy they have created with their support of microdata versus RDFa, and they do a good job of explaining their decisions here: http://schema.org/docs/faq.html.

The general consensus seems to be that RDFa is in many ways a more complete solution for semantic expression than microdata, but RDFa is difficult and intimidating for developers to grasp and therefore suffers from adoption outside of certain niche fields (such as BioMed2.0). We don’t mind handling the difficulty of RDFa because our field has already forced us to deal with the challenges of sharing large complex data sets and to wrap our heads around ontologies and other semantic concepts.

One way to interpret this would be to say that what we are doing with the semantic web in BioMed is great, and that we should continue down our path while industry takes a baby step into the semantic web with the more-pragmatic if less-complete microdata approach.  At the surface, this would seem like a fine solution.  The problem is: now we have industry and BioMed on different paths.  For those people (like us at UCSF) who want to combine the best technical solutions from industry with the best technical solutions of academia and research, this can be a problem.

In particular at UCSF we want to combine our “academic” BioMed semantic web solutions with the “industry” OpenSocial specification to create something that is a better way to publish and share data rich applications than either one of those technologies can support by themselves today.  In pursuing this we’re already seeing issues with bridging RDFa into the JSON centric world of OpenSocial.  Mapping RDFa to JSON is a tough problem to solve, and a number of solutions have been proposed (search RDFa and JSON) without any clear winner.  However with microdata, going from semantic web to JSON/OpenSocial might not be as hard.  Given industries favor of pragmatism over elegance, and the recognition that JSON is THE dominant data exchange method on the web today, this would hardly be surprising.  So…., for some of us this “support of the semantic web & simultaneous challenge to RDFa” may be good news after all!

Now we just need to deal with the very real problem of getting VIVO, Profiles and the rest of our BioMed2.0 systems to produce microdata as well as RDFa.  And why not?  Supporting one format, even by mandate, does not mean you shouldn’t support another.  If you want to share data and ideas, which we say we want to do, then the more the merrier.

Filed under Collaboration Tools, Profiles Research Networking Software, Research Networking, UCSF Profiles, VIVO

Facebook for scientists

April 20, 2011 by 4 Comments

When I describe UCSF Profiles to friends, I sometimes refer to it as Facebook or LinkedIn for scientists.

But I’m not the only one. All of the following science networking platforms have been compared to either Facebook or LinkedIn for scientists: Nature Network, ResearchGate, Vivo, Graduate Junction, Epernicus, Laboratree, Academia.edu, ScholarLynk, and iAMscientist. (Phew.)

It’s easy to launch umpteen social networks and make ambitious comparisons. Building real value and adoption is hard—which is why I enjoyed reading “Facebook for Scientists: Requirements and Services for Optimizing How Scientific Collaborations Are Established,” a 2008 paper by a team at the University of Pittsburgh, using standard HCI practices to understand challenges and needs around research collaboration as they were work to build out their Digital|Vita platform for their campus community. As we think about next steps for UCSF Profiles, it helps me to reconnect with the basic needs we’re trying to address, and look at how other projects approach the problem space.

Filed under Research Networking, Researcher Profiles

visualcomplexity.com | A visual exploration on mapping complex networks

April 14, 2011 by 1 Comment

visualcomplexity.com | A visual exploration on mapping complex networks.

I found an interesting site for interesting visualizations of networks… here’s their description of what this site is about:

VisualComplexity.com intends to be a unified resource space for anyone interested in the visualization of complex networks. The project’s main goal is to leverage a critical understanding of different visualization methods, across a series of disciplines, as diverse as Biology, Social Networks or the World Wide Web. I truly hope this space can inspire, motivate and enlighten any person doing research on this field.

Filed under Research Networking, Visualizations

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