Confirmation: 2collab is over!

As expected since July 2010 (see http://scienceintelligence.wordpress.com/tag/2collab/), the Elsevier social bookmarking service will be discontinued as from April 15, 2011.

Elsevier advices to migrate data to Mendeley or to RefWorks.

http://www.2collab.com/warning/

New design for Research Trends

Research Trends, the bibliometric newsletter published by Elsevier and based on Scopus data, has been moved to a nice new WordPress platform.

It offers a fresh look and some social features: ratings of articles, share into an impressive range of social tools (excpet into 2collab which is pretty funny for an Elsevier product!!), etc…

http://www.researchtrends.com/

STM Social bookmarking and Journal evaluation

To complete previous posts (see 13th and 15th of December), look at this nice presentation that Stefanie Haustein and Sabrina Reher have presented at Science and Technology Indicators Conference in Leiden last September.

They applied social bookmarking data to evaluate the usage of scientific journals.

Social Bookmarking tools for scientists: a test

Social bookmarking tools enable people to bookmark interesting resources on the web, tag them, and share the information with other users.

Scientists want to store, search, and share professional, scholarly literature.  Today there are four established social bookmarking tools serving academic purposes:

1. CiteULike (www.citeulike.org),
2. Connotea (www.connotea.org),
3. BibSonomy (www.bibsonomy.org),
4. and 2collab (www.2collab.com).

 In social bookmarking, users play the key role. The whole idea is to profit from content created by a large number of users.

The competition among BibSonomy, CiteULike, and Connotea raises the question of whether one service will be able to gain an edge over its competitors.

Results of the test:

The road testing was to create 10 references from various publishers to see how often bookmark was successfullty created without subsequent manual correction

• CITEULIKE:
  • 480,000 visits per month
  • +++: Citegeist (most popular articles)
  • Road testing: 8/10
• CONNOTEA:
  • 690,000 visits:per month
  • +++: My Library toolbox
  • +++: target the medical community
  • Road testing: 3/10
• BIBSONOMY:
  • 620,000 visits per month
  • Road testing: 4/10
• 2COLLAB:
  • 44,000 visits per month
  • Road testing: 1/10

Because of its poor abilities (except with ScienceDirect references) 2collab is renamed “2collapse” by authors of the article!

Sabrina Reher; Stefanie Haustein. Social Bookmarking in STM: PUTTING SERVICES TO THE ACID TEST. ONLINE, Vol.34, N°6, Nov-Dec 2010, pp. 34-42

Is 2Collab still alive?

Since it has experienced spam attacks in October 2009, the Elsevier
collaboration tools seems to be sleeping.

A French customer reports that Elsevier advised him to look for another
tool: “Given the current spam problems, it is probably best for you to look
for a solution other than 2collab, at the present time. ” !
(cf: http://delicious.com/bibliothecaire/2collab )

2collab icon has also disappeared from ScienceDirect interface…
Is it the first official failure of Elsevier in Web 2.0 applications engagement?

The Information “explosion”

“Scientists now read 25 per cent more articles from almost twice as many journals than they did six years ago“…

It is an ongoing challenge for them to keep up-to-date on research developments in their field, and identify relevant research to support their own studies without spending too much time gathering irrelevant information.  One solution to this is a combination of accurate information sourcing and sharing, resulting in ‘collective intelligence’..

 The full-article, mentioning the social bookmarking service 2collab, from Elsevier:

http://www.researchinformation.info/features/feature.php?feature_id=179

 

3 Social bookmarking solutions for research Collaboration compared

A social bookmarking fan compared recently 3 of the great free tools: Zotero, Connotea (Nature) and 2Collab (Elsevier). 

2Collab ”is in many ways the best of the three“.
“The emphasis on collaboration makes 2collab more than just a place to store, categorize and manage your scholarly bookmarks. It is also easy to discover new research material, share and identify quality information and mine the collective wisdom of experts. You can also form discussions in private groups or openly with the wider scientific community.
You can add references easily by using a bookmarklet in your browser or importing them from your browser, another social bookmarking or bibliographical site (Scopus).
You can export references in different format. In addition, your library can be shared online with groups of colleagues.

http://www.pandia.com/sew/967-social-bookmarking-for-research-collaboration.html