Pointing your peers in the right direction

Since its inception, the internet has enabled people to inform anyone who cares what’s on their bookshelf or the CDs they listen to. But now the idea has been taken several steps forward with the full introduction of Connotea, a free-to-use web community from the Nature Publishing Group that enables scientific researchers and information professionals to log the web resources they access and share them with their fellow scientists.

Timo Hannay, director of web publishing at Nature Publishing Group, says: “We have taken some of the latest technical and social trends on the web – notably social book-marking and tagging – and applied them in a way that we hope scientists will find useful for managing and discovering information.”

By storing web resources on Connotea, users are able to access them from any web browser at any time; while the community element of the site means that users can make public what resources they access – and see the resources their peers use.

As IWR discovered when testing the site, which recently won an Award for Publishing Innovation from the Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers , scientists are not only book-marking and tagging scientific, technical and medical (STM) resources. News sources, such as The Times and The Guardian newspaper websites, are also included.

Fair shares for all

Share and share alike is the central premise of Connotea, which is evident from the front page, which features two boxes. The first lists the subject tags users are predominantly researching – such as “Avian Flu” and “H5N1” when we did our site test in mid-October.

A second box features a list of the most active users, with each user name being a hyperlink through to their personal library – the set of saved and tagged resources that shows users what their peers are researching and the resources they are accessing.

It was interesting to note the difference between researchers – some had specialised libraries focusing on a core subject or two, other’s had widespread and seemingly random selections, covering a range of topics, from science through to internet technology.

Users need to register, which is a rapid process, and IWR was able to begin researching and sharing its findings within minutes.

The developers of Connotea have engineered-in a high level of automation, which is a good thing. People don’t like too many barriers to entry when something’s free, and if a system is too complicated it will only be used by die-hards and enthusiasts. Also, much of the metadata processing needed to search and collect information has been automated, making it easy to use.

So how do you share your research? Once registered and a member of the Connotea community, users go to their personal library. On the right-hand side of this is a toolbox, which houses web tools for creating bookmarks and groups, for exporting a library and for connecting to OpenURL resources.

To add a new resource users select the ‘Add a new bookmark’ link. Then they are taken through to a table page that enables them to upload and categorise data about the resource.

Once the link is pasted in, users can click on the “Look Up” button, a tool that automatically identifies and adds core data about a journal into Connotea. If the system doesn’t automatically recognise the resource, adding in core data is no hardship – it only requires a title, an optional description, and your own tag.

Everyone can play tag

Tags, in the Connotea environment, are where each registered user gets to be an information professional and categorise the resources they use.

The idea here is that users select tags that they will remember and that they feel fit the use they have for the resource. With OpenURL and DOI technology incorporated, Connotea provides a personalised environment for searching resources that may be held at your institution, whilst DOI is becoming increasingly popular as the core method for linking STM content.

Connotea also strives to be part of a users’ workflow, a popular ambition with systems from information providers, such as Thomson and Factiva at present.

For example, in its online training, Connotea recommends making the site available on the Favourites Toolbar within your browser, which makes the process of accessing and adding content to your Connotea library more simple.

Connotea is attractive not only as a single online resource for storing and accessing your research favourites, but also that of any other member of the community. Your research is their research, in the Connotea community.

As well as using the tags to subject areas from the front page, users can also use the impressive search tool situated at the top of the site.

Range of search options

The search tool uses a drop down menu for selecting the resource groups users would like to research, which includes the ability to search your library, tag names, other users or Google.

Tag searching is an amazing short cut for busy researchers. As already mentioned, when IWR tested Connotea, scientists across Europe were trying to get up to speed on bird flu. And it is easy to see how, with so many people researching the subject, each with their own theories and conclusions, the ability to monitor and share useful resources quickly could help improve results.

Connotea is an online example of how many hands can make light work, with resources from across the globe and stored in every known repository appearing in the tag area on the site.

Search results are clean and easy to use, and are presented in a table format that enables users to copy other people’s searches into their own library for easy access later, as well as to read abstracts, see full article titles and browse URLs.

Sharing your thoughts and the resources that lead you to yourconclusions is never easy, especially for the creatively minded at the cutting edge of science and technology. But by doing so, confusion is often clarified and difficulties made much more amenable.

Connotea is a clever tool formaking sure ideas about helpful resources are not confined to certain PCs or buildings. However, this reviewer does wonder if the information on the site is monitored and used for competitive advantage by Nature Publishing Group .

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