Abstract
BackgroundKeeping up with journal articles on a daily basis is an important activity of scientists engaged in biomedical research. Usually, journal articles and papers in the field of biomedicine are accessed through the Medline/PubMed electronic library. In the process of navigating PubMed, researchers unknowingly generate user-specific reading profiles that can be shared within a social networking environment. This paper examines the structure of the social networking environment generated by PubMed users.MethodsA web browser plugin was developed to map [in Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) terms] the reading patterns of individual PubMed users.ResultsWe developed a scientific social network based on the personal research profiles of readers of biomedical articles. A browser plugin is used to record the digital object identifier or PubMed ID of web pages. Recorded items are posted on the activity feed and automatically mapped to PubMed abstract. Within the activity feed a user can trace back previously browsed articles and insert comments. By calculating the frequency with which specific MeSH occur, the research interests of PubMed users can be visually represented with a tag cloud. Finally, research profiles can be searched for matches between network users.ConclusionsA social networking environment was created using MeSH terms to map articles accessed through the Medline/PubMed online library system. In-network social communication is supported by the recommendation of articles and by matching users with similar scientific interests. The system is available at http://bioknol.org/en/.Electronic supplementary materialThe online version of this article (doi:10.1186/s13104-016-1920-y) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.
Highlights
Keeping up with journal articles on a daily basis is an important activity of scientists engaged in biomedical research
By limiting the system to a biomedical knowledge domain, we developed the mechanism of matching the frequencies of occurrence of Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) to create social groups of researchers working in a similar field
The plugin was connected to the server through the protocol: (1) transmit the current URL to the server; (2) receive if URL matched to the list of the scientific websites appointed by server administrator; (3) display if the website is monitored or not and provide an option for a user to include current site into the list for monitoring; (4) notify the user if the current web page could be unequivocally translated into the article identifier, either digital object identifier (DOI) or PubMedID
Summary
Keeping up with journal articles on a daily basis is an important activity of scientists engaged in biomedical research. In the process of navigating PubMed, researchers unknowingly generate user-specific reading profiles that can be shared within a social networking environment. This paper examines the structure of the social networking environment generated by PubMed users. In the projects Nature Network and PubMed Commons, participants are invited to comment on articles. Most scientific articles represent a collective achievement and the list of co-authors on a paper lacks specific information about individual contributions. Scientific crowdsourcing necessarily involves posting interesting papers at the aggregate portal. This activity adds momentum to the research effort because the user must decide whether a paper is worth reading.
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