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• John Dupuis

  03 April 2008 | 14:58

  I think Nature is making some good progress with the building blocks for a really good site for scientists. Nature Network, Connotea, Scintilla/PostGenomic, Precedings and Second Life are all good first steps. The problem is that they’re not connected but exist as separate modules. A good second step would be integrate all those tools into one online environment.

  A good third step would be to add support for the writing process. Integration with Google Docs (or something like it), Zotero and other citation management tools such as CiteULike, EndNote or RefWorks.

  Beyond that, the integration of wiki tools for lab notebooks would probably be great, as would adding data repositories and computational modeling tools.

  How’s that for a wish list? And I’m not even a scientist ;-)

• Sabine Hossenfelder

  09 April 2008 | 16:59

  Here’s a wish: I wish there was a useful online tool to organize citation lists. Like, an aggregate where one can put together folders for certain projects, or just areas of interest, with links to the papers, and the possibility to add comments. The whole thing should ideally be im/exportable as a latex bibitem list, so one could in the end just copy it into a paper (it is so annoying one has to go through SPIRES to get the latex for every single paper). It would also be useful if in addition to papers one could add websites or blogposts to these folders, so one has everything together.

  (oh, and in case that already exists and I’m reinventing the wheel, maybe somebody could let me know…?)

• John Dupuis

  09 April 2008 | 19:22

  Hi Sabine,

  I think Zotero is heading in that direction and is one of the best products out there for citation management. It’s free and open source and developed by a foundation, so it’s a project worth supporting.

  I’m not sure how much it supports latex/bibtex import/export and I’d be interested in hearing what your experiences are with that. It does interface with OpenOffice and Word.

  The main downside right now for Zotero is that the data isn’t stored on a server, but on the PC you install it on. They’re working on that feature, though.

  All Ontario universities do have access to the commercial product RefWorks which is also very good and does support latex import & export and interfaces with Word.

• Eva Amsen

  11 April 2008 | 15:27

  RefWorks export function does not really like exporting many references at once. I need to export over 300, and it just kept hanging and sticking and timing out. I can export small folders one by one, so now I need to go back and make folders of how many it can still export. Hm.

• Maksim Gill

  16 April 2008 | 21:27

  Well,

  I’ve been working on a little system this semester called scienceRate.com. It’s like a collaboration on science documents like journal articles and data. I’m actually really interested in what other features I should add?

  A company is helping me develope it so if it’s a good idea i’ll implmemtn it.

  -Max

• Cameron Neylon

  17 April 2008 | 08:12

  Can I do my broken record routine? :) I don’t want a single website. I want all the websites that have good tools to all talk together seamlessly. As long as there are some agreed standards (bibtex, foaf, rss, and more coming online with FUGE, CML and other scientific controlled vocabs) this is nearly within reach. But it requires all these disparate sites to reach agreement on standards, but more importantly to accept that they lose control of the traffic and presentation and hand that control back to the users.

• Maxine Clarke

  21 April 2008 | 11:11

  Hmm, sounds like a journal, Cameron ;-)

• taqi ahmed khan

  21 April 2008 | 15:52

  i wish that site would contain the feature that if anybody wants to relate his work with any other work.it also contain the detail protocols,how to do that work.it contain the priority for juniors.

• Deepak Singh

  21 April 2008 | 17:44

  What Cameron said!!! Make every site a service and have them talk to each other.

• Sabine Hossenfelder

  21 April 2008 | 20:09

  Hi John,

  Thanks, I will check this out!

  B.

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