Researcher Profiles

AMIA 2012 Joint Summit: a report back in tweets

/ Anirvan Chatterjee / 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:

Measuring total scholarly impact, beyond the cite

/ Anirvan Chatterjee / 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:

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

/ leslieyuan

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

Facebook for scientists

/ Anirvan Chatterjee / 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.

Integrating “grassroot” funding opportunities with research networking

/ Katja Reuter / 3 Comments

I guess most researchers look for money to explore ideas. With little funding they can run initial experiments and find out if an idea is worthy of a grant proposal. But processing small donations comes with difficulties for researchers.

The website SciFlies is preparing to offer a solution. At SciFlies researchers can sign on to build a profiling profile to present themselves and their research projects. On the profile they can present their research vision, past accomplishments, interests and even their current reading list.  Website visitors can then donate and support the projects they find most worthwhile. SciFlies provides a mechanism that allows small financial contributions to accumulate and get delivered at some later point.

This model may be interesting for us and the Virtual Home portal, once we think about ways to reach out to the community. It could create long-term interest in researchers and their work.  But more importantly, it provides a powerful incentive for researchers to update their profiles.

By the way, the thoughts behind the name “SciFlies” are pretty unique.  It says: “It’s a homage to the ubiquitous fruitfly research model, a shorthand description of the goal to create a ‘swarm’ of science supporters, and a reference to ‘fly’, a slang term for cool.”

P.S. The SciFlies website  is work in progress. I will update the blog as soon as the website is fully launched.