Database Helps Researchers Share and Find Those Data that Don’t Make it Into Peer-Reviewed Publications – A New Data Source for UCSF Profiles?

October 23, 2011February 20, 2012 / Katja Reuter / 2 Comments

Unpublished or negative data rarely leave the lab books, even though they may help the scientific community at large avoid the repetition of unnecessary experiments. I recently came across the Academic Productivity blog and Mark Hahnel’s post about FigShare, an interesting initiative, released in March 2011, that tries to make it easy for researchers to share those types of research results. Since the data are categorized and tagged, I’m wondering whether – at some point – the database could turn into a data source for Profiles.

Mark Hahnel explains FigShare:

This is a new way of bringing scientific research online and to a new audience. By categorising and tagging the research, it becomes very searchable …there is also the ability to easily share figures, datasets and videos via a host of social media platforms through ‘share buttons’ on every page.

Read the original post

Also noteworthy, FigShare is collaborating with Digital Science which provides a suite of tools to make science more productive.

Social Media and Science? Let’s Hear What Scientists Tell Us

June 6, 2011June 6, 2011 / Katja Reuter

I’m not surprised about the “slowness” that we see with respect to lab managers and scientists engaging in social media, as discussed in our earlier post. Many of us, scientists included, are still learning the ropes of productive online communication.

However in this video from Imperial College London scientists share some great insights how and why they actually use social media tools and how these tools help them with their research, their networking and managing their work.

Here are a couple of things I found interesting:

They use those social media tools that they know others (colleagues etc.) use.
Twitter seems the exception: Scientist may use Twitter (whether their colleagues use it or not) to follow science news feeds and people with interest in science. They appreciate that the breaking news coming out of Twitter are sometimes faster than the BBC. They tweet about their research and the research done by others.
Some use social media tools to increase their chances of being identified as an expert in a certain field.
Blogging and peer-reviewed publications don’t exclude each other: One researcher shares his experience how some of his blog posts have sparked follow-up discussions, have matured into scholarly articles and “accelerated the progress of science”. He also mentions that in some cases he gets more feedback (comments) on a blog post than giving a talk at a conference.
Preserving precious work: Some write blog posts based on tutorials, seminars which they developed for their students, designed to explain things in the best way.
Libel actions can become an issue, but it seems users of social media tools learn to deal with those as they go along.
Mendeley seems popular: Scientists use it to find papers that are relevant to their research concept and what others have published in a certain area – 2 things that our research networking tool, UCSF Profiles, seems to do pretty well.
Other tools they mention include Slideshare, Papers (a social paper management tool), Google docs, Google calendar, Wikipedia, Astrophysics Data System (a digital library portal for researchers in Astronomy and Physics) and arxiv.