Scientific Researchers and Web 2.0: Social Not Working? forum: topic
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Organizing references by tags or search (or both)?
Maxine Clarke
Monday, 23 February 2009 17:35 UTC
David Crotty, of Cold Spring Harbor Protocols and Bench Marks blog, writes a downbeat post about online social tagging and why in his opinion it isn’t working. Social bookmarking sites, in which you organize your references by tags, are tedious to use, he says, as well as adding bureacracy (writing summaries). He is keener on a full-text search system, citing Papers (which as far as I am aware is only a Mac application, not for use on a PC).
An opposite view, to which David is in effect responding in his own post, is that of William Gunn, who thinks that a system of expert reviewers tagging and recommending papers is the “killer app” of science 2.0.
I myself tend to rely on search rather than tags when looking things up, but I am not a researcher and, in the line of my job, I am constantly looking things up in different “universes” of literature. If I were a researcher, I am sure I’d have a reference library and I’m sure I’d find it useful to tag and annotate it. My experience of trying this out on Connotea has been very positive, and there are other similar services. I would not be happy depending on search for everything (especially if I had to go out and buy a Mac and learn a new operating system to do it!).
I’m interested to know what Nature Network users do, and think, about this question.
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David – i-tunes? not! I am very old indeed, and basically a lover of the written word and not keen on audio or internet video media. (They are too slow for the quick scan of the magpie, which is what I think the internet is suited to, compared with offline detailed reading of a printed page which can be downloaded for later perusal.)
I am an outlier kind of a person, so it is fascinating to me to know how others manage their information: I have this concept that everyone else does it very efficiently whereas I am more experimental in my approach, and probably less efficient – I certainly find desktop search useful when my tagging and categories fail me, along with everyone else it seems. (I am also not an active researcher, as mentioned above, so my information needs are probably not the same as many Nature Network users who rely on retrievable research reference libraries.)
Connotea – you don’t have to tag, though I think it would make future retrieval hard. I agree that there is no failsafe way – tags and search both have their lacunae, including user ability-limitation.
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Heather – Categories – general subject areas, used in indexing a set of content so fewer. Tags, highly specific, used for search ourside that set of content, so more. Is that a correct distinction?
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No iTunes, hmmm, and I thought I was a luddite! I guess the question to ask is how you organize the files on your desktop computer. Do you spend a lot of time creating folders, renaming any pdf’s you download, setting up hierarchies, or do you just kind of dump stuff into areas on your hard drive and find it with a search later? I find the latter to be a more efficient use of my time. Spotlight on the Mac includes searches of full text of all your documents, so you no longer have to worry about remembering what title you gave something, as just one example.
If you check the links in my first comment, there are several PC programs that serve similar purposes to Papers, albeit not customized for scientific papers. Also, I believe Mendeley’s desktop client gives you some of Papers’ functionality (though as I note in my blog posting, they’ve got some copyright issues that are going to hit them like a brick wall if their software ever catches on).
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I use very different strategies on my computer and on the Internet. Whereas on the computer I try to categorize the files in folders and subfolders and rarely use search, I do the exact opposite on the internet. I have barely stored any bookmarks in my browser other than the most frequently visited sites. I use tags in places like Connotea mainly to connect to these tags from other places like Nature Network. I have barely looked at the items tagged with the same tags by other users, but it is probably worth doing more.
Programs like iTunes or Papers are great because they can organize a particular file type much better than the filesystem. I would for example love to have a similar application for slides and slideshows.
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BTW, a very different (and exciting) use of tags is Microsoft Tag.
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Thomas: because I teach searching in multiple disciplines (connected in general by the biological sciences), I don’t have the luxury of ignoring discipline-specific interpretations — would that I could teach an interpretative framework along with how to find the literature! Instead, that gets left to content-specialists students encounter in classes and labs.
I am a PC user, and looked for a while for a “personal electronic library” system that I could use to manage the variety of stuff I need/want to keep track of. Because my university has switched our unit to a networked system (ugh! hate the lack of personal control), I cannot use a desktop organizer. I LOVE delicious and citeulike b/c I can now store things according to whatever idiosyncratic system I have going (I need to give zotero a look since so many seem to be using it — citeulike works better for my brain than 2collab). I do think it would be very useful to have a set of “discipline-approved” or publisher-accepted tags that would provide a way of at least topically organizing information. But an additional set is still needed for relationships among, and that would be a very exciting system to see developed. In the end, I would not give up the option of personal tagging, though I’d like to see a user-interface that provides options for organizing hierarchically, using established tags or personal tags as needed for a particular task.
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Oh, and on Connotea tagging, it strikes me that your own tags are probably more useful for other people than they are for yourself. They’re certainly handy for someone else looking to discover new literature, but I’m not convinced they’re worth the time for your own stuff. Let’s say I have a paper I’ve read on subject X with result Y. I cleverly tag it on Connotea with X and Y. A year later, I want to find that paper. I can:
1) search my hard drive for the pdf, using X and Y as the search terms and likely find it immediately
2) Go to my Connotea account, log in, go to my X and Y tags, look at the list of pspers under each, find the one I want and then at that point either follow the link to the journal and either read it online (which most people don’t do) or download another pdf copy of the same thing I already have on my hard drive.Why bother? I guess they’re helpful for self-promotion (like pretty much all of Web 2.0, self-promotion seems to be the most useful thing one can get out of it), as it might help get others to discover your own writings if you’ve tagged them. That’s generally why I use Connotea, Digg, Reddit and the like, to promote articles within my own journal, creating additional links and ways for people to find the material. But if I were running a lab, I certainly wouldn’t want my students and postdocs investing hours and hours tagging their reference lists to potentially help out some unknown stranger who may or may not exist.
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