Imagine a world where real-time search is the norm. You will get just the information you seek landing on your lap the exact minute it becomes available, without you having to explicitly search for it. Will this change the way you do science? SciSurfer thinks it will.

The release cycle of scientific knowledge is slow. It may take up to 2 years for a paper to get accepted in a journal. The publishing process in itself will add a buffer of a few months (arguably because of the time cost of having a paper edition, even though most people will never use it). So, for some of us, it doesn’t feel like we are missing much if we do not get the latest updates on our field the very same minute they are published. Just going to conferences yearly feels like more than enough. But there is a portion of the academia that needs constant updates on their field, as close to real-time as possible. If you are in the life sciences, getting the latest paper about a molecule or a gene you work on before your competitor does may make or break your career.

For those academics, sciSurfer may be a very valuable tool. The basic idea of sciSurfer is to integrate all journal feeds and search over them. Note that they do not archive RSS, so only the latest articles are available. This is a different way to think about search, closer to twitter’s than to Google’s.

In use

If you are used to RSS feed readers, the interface will look familiar. Left side there’s a list of journals and searches. Every time there’s a new unread item the containing ‘folder’ turns bold. On the right side there’s a list of articles (title, authors, and abstract). The journal it comes from is shown in green. The interface resembles Google reader (in fact, sciSurfer is built on app engine, so it may share code with reader).

What is the advantage of scisurfer over simply subscribing to the RSS feed of the journals? Search. Scisurfer does searches over all the journals they are indexing. This is pretty impressive, because I don’t know of any search engine that works on RSS feeds. Using an RSS reader, the equivalent to scisurfer would be to subscribe to the RSS of all journals, and apply searches over those. This is beyond the capabilities of most destop RSS readers. Implementing search by author, abstract, etc is also beyond the feature set of a normal RSS reader. In fact, it’s not that easy to deal with author names. We all have had the experience of getting papers by people with the same lastname and initials as our intended query term that are NOT the person we are looking for. Thomson Reuters has a solution: researcher ID. Researcher ID is based on the simple idea that each individual would get a unique identification (ID) number acting as a digital “calling card” that the researcher can place anywhere, such as a personal home page, a CV, or a university page. It has been out for more than two years now, so it’s still too early to say whether it has been adopted successfully.

Apart from the reader, there are two other tools, news and journals. Searching journals by name integrates the RSS feeds of otherwise disperse journals. Still, I haven’t found a good use for this tool.

Navigating trends

The main use I can think of for sciSurfer is monitoring Trending topics. We are getting used to explosions in popularity thanks to twitter and Facebook updates. Good twitter clients show you ‘what’s hot’ together with an explanation on why. Even Mendeley is getting status updates these days, making it look more and more like ‘facebook for scientists’.

There are several things to like about sciSurfer.  It integrates with your Google account, so it’s one less login to remember. The devs show that they are on top of things and the result is a fast turnaround when I requested changes. They are very open about feature requests. In my experience, when a journal was not in sciSurfer’s list, the devs added it within hours.

But by far the best result of using sciSurfer is that it makes you aware of what is going on in your field in a way that feels different and pleasant. The most similar feeling that I got online is when I found a neat Phd. student tagging articles in citeUlike that are relevant for me (it’s like finding a gold mine).

Mendeley uses a similar real-time approach in their statistics. For example, they show what are the most read papers per discipline at a given point in time.

I’m not sure one can do searches according to popularity just yet on any of these tools, implementing a real-time soft peer review.

How does sciSurfer plan to make money? The free tool is limited to ten saved searches. They will charge for extra functionality. There’s an iPhone version coming, which may well be another source of funds.

Conclusion

As the number of publications grows, it becomes more and more difficult to follow the latest scientific trends. The approach that sciSurfer takes is that if you know your keywords then it should be trivial to filter the fire hose of information, by doing a trivial keyword match. While keyword match could go a long way, I’m skeptical that the future of search lies in dumb matching. The way I currently filter information is very social, that is, I’m surrounded by people I respect and I ‘feel’ what they believe is good research. If I’m like most researchers, then social filtering would be a natural fit. However, I rarely get value from social networks online (science-wise; no matter how hard social networks try to capture my attention!). It may well be that to form a reputation, scientists need to do far more than posting interesting updates in their microblogging feeds. And for us to follow their recommendations…

This is a quick note that may not surprise most people. Amy Bishop, at University of Alabama  Huntsville, just killed three colleagues and injured some more. It seems that this act may be related to having been denied tenure.  A PhD from Harvard, Amy Bishop had grants, and sat in a startup board, which are traces of a successful academic career. She was also a mother of four. Can your academic job environment be so toxic as to motivate murder? She was possibly suffering major depression at the time of the incident, and other mental health issues.

The evidence that an academic career is too stressing is piling up. An academic deals with rejection very often, from both peers and students, gets paid like a boy scout, and works every waking hour. This should be a waking call to all academics that feel tenure is the center of their lives.

A Previous Shooting Death at the Hands of Alabama Suspect – NYTimes.com

UPDATE: removed wrong photo.

Is blogging writing? Of course! You say. I would have said the same, before I encountered Jaron Lanier’s essay:

The question of new business models for content creators on the Internet is a profound and difficult topic in itself, but it must at least be pointed out that writing professionally and well takes time and that most authors need to be paid to take that time. In this regard, blogging is not writing. For example, it’s easy to be loved as a blogger. All you have to do is play to the crowd. Or you can flame the crowd to get attention. Nothing is wrong with either of those activities. What I think of as real writing, however, writing meant to last, is something else. It involves articulating a perspective that is not just reactive to yesterday’s moves in a conversation.

What he means is simply that what ‘serious writing’ is about may well have nothing to do with blogging. Blogging is closer to stream-of-conciousness, barely any revisions; ‘serious writing’ for an academic paper implies maybe three paragraphs a day (depending on how much you know the topic!), lots of going back-and-forth with collaborators, and attention to wording that would make a lawyer look sloppy.

And of course, no matter how many readers you may have, blogging will do nothing in an academic CV. Even though some academics publish impressive ideas in their blogs! (examples: Peter Turney’s, Luis von Ahn’s, insert your fav. science blog here).

All academics are painfully aware that writing well takes time, and some know that writing well is not a prerequisite for having a successful blog.

So, basically, it doesn’t pay off to painfully slowly distill ideas for a blog post. In a sense, consuming blog posts –let alone microblogging 140-character blurbs- warrants you a so-so level of refinement. Lanier again:

Except when intelligent thought really matters. In that case the average idea can be quite wrong, and only the best ideas have lasting value. Science is like that.

Reading this literally, it means that if you want quality and polish, read science from the traditional source (i.e., peer reviewed journals) and not from blogs. Playing to the crowd –what bloggers must do, according to Lanier- does not require incredibly solid thinking; it’s a completely different skill.

Still, I’m convinced that some ideas’ natural ecosystem is the blog post, and some papers are unnecessarily elaborated and boring without necessity.

What I think could work is a hybrid between a focused paper (that nobody would read other than a close circle of scientists) and a blog post that ‘plays to the masses’ and tries hard to capture attention at the cost of rigor and polish.

And, is science really that far ‘above and beyond’ the pop culture of the internet? If anything, there are things that science can adopt from pop culture. Most scientists fail at communicating with the general public, and often, with their peers. Every time you go to a talk in a conference and cannot keep your concentration on it no matter how hard you try, it is a communication problem. Pop writers have that part down! It’s just a matter of time until we (or our scientific publishers) realize how much we could gain by being readable, popular, and accessible. If only selection committees would consider how much a candidate engages the public as a criteria! It doesn’t have to be the general public, but maybe at the very least other fellow disciplines.

Do you have examples of people in science that do just this?(Use blogs or popular books to get ideas across that would have died otherwise)? Please post in the comments.

Maybe I’m getting out of touch, but it’s only now that I found sciencewatch. It’s a service of Thomson Reuters (the makers of Web of Science) that collects and displays statistics on recent trends in science. Example:

Aug 2008 – SCHOLARLY USE OF THE WORLD WIDE WEB – Research Front Map – ScienceWatch.com

This is a citation network that shows highly cited papers on WWW. Diameter relates to citation: the two bigger circles are the paper that proposed the Hirsch index, and King’s paper on the scientific impact of nations. Clicking on the circles provides details on the papers.

There are many other fronts:

• Fast Breaking papers. These papers comprise the top 1% of papers in each field and each year
• Top Topics selects the Research Fronts with the largest absolute increase in size in each of the 22 major fields covered by Essential Science Indicators

Worth keeping an eye on.

Good news for FOSS and the entire industry, really. Thomson Reuters claim didn’t hold on court. In an ecosystem where all competitors are launching new creative features every day (Mendeley, Zotero, citeSmart, jabRef, etc), development of endNote seems glacial.

EndNote maker’s lawsuit over open-source Zotero dismissed – Ars Technica