Archive for February 2011
Conference Announcement: PharmaBioMed in Venice!
Dear Colleagues:
We are pleased to announce the date and venue for the next Pharma-Bio-Med Conference & Exposition. The conference will be held at the beautiful NH Laguna Palace Hotel located in Mestre-Venice, Italy, November 14-16, 2011.
Pharma-Bio-Med is the premier Conference & Exposition in Europe tailored specifically to the interests of Information and Informatics Professionals working within the pharmaceutical, biotechnology, biomedical, medical, and health sciences industries.
The 6th annual conference will feature a strong programme and is the ideal forum for continuing education, professional development, networking, and the sharing and benchmarking of information best practices.
Pharma-Bio-Med 2011 Conference & Exhibition
14th 16th November 2011
NH Laguna Palace Hotel
Mestre-Venice, Italy
Registration & Evening Reception 13th November
Conference Plenary Sessions 14th 16th November
Optional Workshops 13th and 17th November
The Pharma-Bio-Med 2011 Call for Papers, as well as other details, will be posted shortly to the conference website (www.pharma-bio-med.com).
Join the Pharma-Bio-Med discussion list (at www.pharma-bio-med.com) to receive the latest announcements regarding Pharma-Bio-Med 2011, including early registration announcement details.
Library bloggers appear to be turning to social media
Based on 1,108 professional and personal blogs (Library and Information Science related) indexed by LibWorm, this study tends to show that adoption of FaceBook and Twitter has a negative effect on blogs production.
Some findings:
The importance of blogs, however, has been affected by the arrival of new tools for social networking (e.g., Facebook and Twitter), which now rival blogs as primary communications media tools on the Internet.
Once blogs were at the core of social networks, but now the Web 2.0 conversation has fragmented, with general interest shifting away from blogs in favor of other platforms. Indeed, the bloggers themselves are the ones who, as early adopters, have popularized the newer applications.
Libraries and information centers have been especially active in the creation and management of blogs as part of a communications strategy for offering new services for their patrons
The results obtained show a loss of significance for blogs as a communications medium for the LIS community, as indicated by the closure of blogs and the reduction in gross number of posts being published. These losses have been constant and steady and have affected all the blog types studied, personal and corporate.
These figures could merely be showing that bloggers have been migrating to other services and applications that are increasing in usage, specifically Twitter and Facebook.
In all cases the corporate blogs presented values thatwere significantly lower than personal blogs and only blogs of academic or public libraries had figures of any significance, demonstrating that success and visibility in the blogosphere is closely linked to personal initiative.
Conclusion:
The decline in personal blogs is less pronounced than in corporate, and productivity and visibility patterns in both categories show that personal blogs are more active and have greater impact than corporate blogs. A small core collection of blogs, a reference group for the LIS community, seems to persist despite the general decline.
Torres-Salinas, D., et al., State of the library and information science blogosphere after social networks boom: A metric approach, Library & Information Science Research (2011), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.lisr.2010.08.001
Patents Thomson Innovation: well rated by Intellogist
Thomson Innovation, the latest Patent tools by Thomson is well rated by the Intellogist community (in my sense, the best source for patents databases comparison).
http://www.intellogist.com/wiki/Report:Thomson_Innovation/System_Data
Find science papers fast
PubGet is an amazing tool, to retrieve free and legal PDF once you have a reference. It is not new, but that I didn’t know it, so far.
Of course, the coverage is limited to Medline content, and the full-text document is not always provided. Anyway, it could be a great tool to help end-users when they want to know when an article is freely available somewhere.
Moreover, what is disruptive, is that the search experience is based on documents availability and not only on relevance and completness.
(optimized with an institution subscription)
Follow them at: http://blog.pubget.com/
Research Gate: the last one?
With some important milestones (700,000 members, mainly in the U.S. and a new design), will ResearchGate be the last Science Social Network to survive?
Facebook: beneficial or stressful?
The more Facebook ‘friends’ you have, the more likely you are to feel stressed out by the social networking site, according to a study by Scottish researchers.
Researchers concluded that for a significant number of users the negative effects of Facebook outweighed the benefits of staying in touch with friends and family.
Kathy Charles, who led the study said: “The results threw up a number of paradoxes. For instance, although there is great pressure to be on Facebook there is also considerable ambivalence amongst users about its benefits.
“And we found it was actually those with the most contacts, those who had invested the most time in the site, who were the ones most likely to be stressed.”
the best thing about Facebook was ‘keeping in touch’, however without any further explanation.
UK Research links Facebook popularity to increased stress. Information World Review, Online, 17/02/2011.
http://www.iwr.co.uk/social-media/3010750/UK-research-links-Facebook-popularity-to-increased-stress-
Sciverse ScienceDirect: the first review
As far as I Know, this is the first published review of the recent Sciverse ScienceDirect.
The author gives an in-depth vision of the product: search facilities, screen shots, resources content, list of improvements, etc.
He reminds the aim of the project: “The aim seems to be not only to create an interface that provides broad functionality on par with other database search tools that many searchers use regularly but also to create an open platform that could be changed to respond effectively to the needs of customers”.
Conclusions of the reviewer are rather positive:
“The image search is a handy feature. The images search allows users to find articles containing images, including tables, in which they are interested. This allows users to not only use those images but also to cite them properly by their article of origin. (…)
SciVerse has its shortcomings, but it is an excellent all-around search tool. (…). by offering advanced keyword searching, citation searching, a very solid image search, strong tools within the list of returns, and an integrated package, Elsevier has made an extremely useful product for the research community.”
Bengtson, Jason (2011). ‘ScienceDirect Through SciVerse: A New Way To Approach Elsevier’, Medical Reference Services Quarterly, 30: 1, 42 — 49
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02763869.2011.541346
