These are the notes for my upcoming Steacie Library Grad Student Workshops. This post will include the notes for both Part 1 (Web 2.0 for Scientists) and Part 2 (Cool Tools for Scholars)
What is web 2.0, anyway? Tim O’Reilly or Wikipedia?
Take a look at the power of web 2.0 technologies to solve your problems.
Let’s take a look at some tools that will help you with the research process from start to finish!
- Invisible college: networking
- Literature review: environment scan, keeping up, organizing readings
- Executing the project: keeping track of results
- Writing up the work: document preparation
- Disseminating: distributing and popularizing the work
Blogging & RSS (IC, LR, Dis)
Reading what’s going on
- ResearchBlogging.org — blogging about peer reviewed research
- Planet Musings — physics blog aggregator
- PlanetYork
- Web Elements Chemistry News Aggregator
- Chemical Blogspace
- PostGenomic — aggregator for genetics blogs
- Scintilla — general science blog aggregator
- AcademicBlogs — list of academic blogs by discipline
- ScienceBlogs — very fine science blogging aggregator & community
- Discover Blogs — new kid on the community block, by Discover magaszine
Doing your own!
- Hosting services like Blogger or WordPress
- Nature Network Blogs
- Scientific Blogging
- Microblogging like Twitter or FriendFeed
- Twitter example: Hoatlin Lab , Mars Phoenix
Don’t forget RSS aggregators like Bloglines & Google Reader.
Also, lots of journals have RSS feeds for their TOCs.
Social Bookmarking & Citation Management (LR, Writing)
- del.icio.us — most popular social bookmarking site
- Connotea — just like del.icio.us but geared for academia, by Nature
- 2collab — similar to Connotea but by Elsevier
- Mendeley — new citation management system, more like workflow management
- CiteULike — another academic citation/bookmarking site. Can also look at journal TOCs
- Zotero — Firerfox browser add-in, free and open source, supported by non-profit foundation. Coolest and most forward looking of the bunch
- RefWorks — officially sanctioned York-sponsored product
Using Wikis in Reseach (Results)
- Useful Chemistry — by Canadian Jean-Claude Bradley
- Differential Geometry by Garret Lisi
- OpenWetWare — whole system of lab wikis & blogs
- ISIS Biomolecular Science Lab — lab wiki by Cameron Neylon
Social Networks for Scientists (IC, Dis)
- Nature Network — Facebook for scientists
- LinkedIn — contact & network building, used by a lot of scientists
Collaborative Document Creation (Writing & Dis)
- Google Docs — pretty complete online version of MS Office with sharable documents
- Zoho — another similar one
- SlideShare — share your PowerPoint slides with the world
Using Audio & Video (Dis)
- Journal of Visualized Experiments — video version of experiments
- SciVee – like YouTube for scientists
- Nature podcasts
- NASA podcasts
Bringing it all Together: Lifestreaming
- FriendFeed — aggregates all your feeds and shows you the content from trusted friends. Also facilitates conversation better than most other platforms.
