Ania Truszczynski invited me to give a little talk on the use of various collaborative tools for scientists. I enjoyed presenting this as a chalk-talk, but alas no slides to link so here’s a list of reference. Rather than the impossible attempt to be comprehensive, this is restricted to resources I use regularly and have found to be the best of their class. All are freely available.
Tools
Science Blogs (e.g. Arsenic Life & peer review) ressearchblogging.org
Preprint servers (arXiv, Nature Precedings)
Twitter (a Scientist’s intro)), also see (Eysenbach, 2011)
Mendeley - social reference manager
Github - social coding
Wordpress - collaborative website (WP for scientists)
Google Docs, Dropbox (but try Wordpress or github)
RSS readers (all the above can create RSS feeds of updates)
A few tools I didn’t mention: Increase your impact: share your science. Dryad (published data), FigShare (Figures and data), Slideshare (slides)
Risks & Rewards
I mentioned the use of these tools in filtering information overload and in building a network that can assist and promote you.
We discussed that any of these tools can be used at varying degrees of openness. Using them in a more open way often increases the potential rewards they can provide, but also the risks that come with increased exposure. Being unknown or less known carries different risks.
It’s easy to worry about giving away your science. But giving it away can be really hard, as anyone whose replicated someone else’s publication knows. I’ve tried to make it easy, but I bet it’s never as simple as I imagine. Can you find and replicate a graph I’ve produced this week, name two papers I’ve read (did I like them?), or find technical question where I’ve been stuck and the code where I implemented the solution someone suggested? What question am I most interested in answering right now? (Thinking I’ll add answer links later).
References
- Eysenbach G (2011). “Can Tweets Predict Citations? Metrics of Social Impact Based on Twitter And Correlation With Traditional Metrics of Scientific Impact.” Journal of Medical Internet Research, 13. https://dx.doi.org/10.2196/jmir.2012.