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.
The confluence of two major trends in scientific research is leading to an upheaval in standard scientific practice and collaborative technologies. A new generation of scientists, working in large-scale collaborations, is repurposing social software for use in collaborative science. Existing social tools such as chat, IM, and FriendFind are being adopted and modified for use as group problem-solving facilities. At the same time, exponentially greater and more complex datasets are being generated at a rate that is challenging the limits of current hardware, software, and human cognitive capability. A concerted effort to create software that will support new scientific practices and handle this data tsunami is redefining the collaboratory and represents a new frontier for computer supported cooperative work.