Online Scientific Communities Research Articles

A Recommendation System for Finding Experts in Online Scientific Communities

Online scientific communities are bases that publish books, journals, and scientific papers, and help promote knowledge. The researchers use search engines to find the given information including scientific papers, an expert to collaborate with, and the publication venue, but in many cases due to search by keywords and lack of attention to the content, they do not achieve the desired results at the early stages. Online scientific communities can increase the system efficiency to respond to their users utilizing a customized search. In this paper, using a dataset including bibliographic information of user’s publication, the publication venues, and other published papers provided as a way to find an expert in a particular context where experts are recommended to a user according to his records and preferences. In this way, a user request to find an expert is presented with keywords that represent a certain expertise and the system output will be a certain number of ranked suggestions for a specific user. Each suggestion is the name of an expert who has been identified appropriate to collaborate with the user. In evaluation using IEEE database, the proposed method reached an accuracy of 71.50 percent that seems to be an acceptable result.

Network-Driven Reputation in Online Scientific Communities

The ever-increasing quantity and complexity of scientific production have made it difficult for researchers to keep track of advances in their own fields. This, together with growing popularity of online scientific communities, calls for the development of effective information filtering tools. We propose here an algorithm which simultaneously computes reputation of users and fitness of papers in a bipartite network representing an online scientific community. Evaluation on artificially-generated data and real data from the Econophysics Forum is used to determine the method's best-performing variants. We show that when the input data is extended to a multilayer network including users, papers and authors and the algorithm is correspondingly modified, the resulting performance improves on multiple levels. In particular, top papers have higher citation count and top authors have higher h-index than top papers and top authors chosen by other algorithms. We finally show that our algorithm is robust against persistent authors (spammers) which makes the method readily applicable to the existing online scientific communities.

Open semantic annotation of scientific publications using DOMEO

BackgroundOur group has developed a useful shared software framework for performing, versioning, sharing and viewing Web annotations of a number of kinds, using an open representation model.MethodsThe Domeo Annotation Tool was developed in tandem with this open model, the Annotation Ontology (AO). Development of both the Annotation Framework and the open model was driven by requirements of several different types of alpha users, including bench scientists and biomedical curators from university research labs, online scientific communities, publishing and pharmaceutical companies.Several use cases were incrementally implemented by the toolkit. These use cases in biomedical communications include personal note-taking, group document annotation, semantic tagging, claim-evidence-context extraction, reagent tagging, and curation of textmining results from entity extraction algorithms.ResultsWe report on the Domeo user interface here. Domeo has been deployed in beta release as part of the NIH Neuroscience Information Framework (NIF, http://www.neuinfo.org) and is scheduled for production deployment in the NIF’s next full release.Future papers will describe other aspects of this work in detail, including Annotation Framework Services and components for integrating with external textmining services, such as the NCBO Annotator web service, and with other textmining applications using the Apache UIMA framework.

Ten Simple Rules for Getting Help from Online Scientific Communities

The increasing complexity of research requires scientists to work at the intersection of multiple fields and to face problems for which their formal education has not prepared them. For example, biologists with no or little background in programming are now often using complex scripts to handle the results from their experiments; vice versa, programmers wishing to enter the world of bioinformatics must know about biochemistry, genetics, and other fields. In this context, communication tools such as mailing lists, web forums, and online communities acquire increasing importance. These tools permit scientists to quickly contact people skilled in a specialized field. A question posed properly to the right online scientific community can help in solving difficult problems, often faster than screening literature or writing to publication authors. The growth of active online scientific communities, such as those listed in Table S1, demonstrates how these tools are becoming an important source of support for an increasing number of researchers. Nevertheless, making proper use of these resources is not easy. Adhering to the social norms of World Wide Web communication—loosely termed “netiquette”—is both important and non-trivial. In this article, we take inspiration from our experience on Internet-shared scientific knowledge, and from similar documents such as “Asking the Questions the Smart Way” and “Getting Answers”, to provide guidelines and suggestions on how to use online communities to solve scientific problems.

Web Forums and the Online Journal

HE Internet provides a pathway for publishers of professional scientific journals to offer electronic access to scientific papers. The online medium also provides valuable features that are not possible for the print journal like full-text search and the inclusion of hyperlinks, images, presentation slides, and other multimedia files. As more journals use the Web for publication, there is potential for using Web technologies to provide interactivity to complement the journal papers, to parallel how conferences provide interactivity for attendees through poster sessions, Birds-of-a-feather (BoF) sessions, and question and answer periods following paper presentations. A commonly used Web tool that can provide interactivity for the online journal is the Web Forum. As online scientific journals begin to evolve, Web Forums can play a role in helping online scientific communities interact and collaborate, in context with peer-reviewed papers.