Labmeeting Social Network for Scientists
There is a new social bookmarking site to manage and share journal articles called Labmeeting. You can upload your pdf’s of articles after registration. It is only available for researchers with a current academic email address. If your academic institution is not on their list you can use their Academic Research Institution Submission form to add your institution to Labmeeting. I did it to test the site and it went quick and smoothly.
Your pdf’s are uploaded and they are automatically parsed and matched to bibliographic records. After upload you can see a thumbnail. The paper is also converted to iPaper so you can easily read it in your browser. You can also upload your pdf’s from your computer.After viewing it in iPaper it is added to your collection were you can add notes and view the abstract. You can import and export endnote, BibTex and PubMed citations easily.
You can create a web-based collection where you can take notes on papers, search, view, and share them with colleagues. The storage is unlimited and you can access your collection online from any computer, you can share your files with your colleagues of the same lab, department etc.
Why Labmeeting?
Besides making an individual researcher’s life easier, we aim to help scientists work with their labmates. Labs have also been using the group functionality, including the group Documents section which lets groups put up files for everyone in lab to see.
They also have a blog with more information on their mission and ideas: Sharing is Searching
The social network?
From a review on MacResearch
Researchers create their own user profile using a university email address. The profile contains all the standard networking information plus sections relevant to your area of research (interests, summary, publications, and lab memberships). Like all good networking sites, you can grab code for embedding a banner linking to your profile to place on sites like your online curriculum vitae. Don’t forget to add a flattering pic of yourself in a lab coat for good measure.
What is really cool is the paper view screen you can read and add notes to the paper for colleagues to view and download it is a PDF to add to your Papers library. And they have a notebook section. This is a central location for documents such as protocols to be uploaded. You can upload lab forms, protocols, notes with your lab mates or colleagues. You can use Labmeeting as a platform to share information about your lab with the world by using the handy public view setting.
One important distinction from Connotea, the other social bookmarking site of journal articles is that you can upload your articles and read them in Labmeeting. Check it out and let me know what you think.
January 14, 2009 @ 8:00 pm
If you’re interested in these types of services, may I point you to Mendeley (http://www.mendeley.com) as well? We’re not a social bookmarking tool, but our focus is also on research paper management and sharing with colleagues and lab-mates.
Mendeley has a desktop client (for Windows, Mac and Linux) which parses metadata and cited references from PDFs automatically. It also indexes the full-text for quick searching, and allows you to create citations in Microsoft Word (and in the future, also Open Office and Pages) using our plugin. PDFs and references can then be synchronized with colleagues via “Shared Document Groups”, and they can also be accessed in a private account on Mendeley Web.
However, if you’re primarily interested in social bookmarking tools, then CiteULike is another great alternative (http://www.citeulike.org).
Best wishes from London!
Victor
January 14, 2009 @ 8:43 pm
Will certainly look into your service, sounds good. Would that mean i have to install software on my computer?
Thanks and kind regards Dr Shock
January 14, 2009 @ 8:54 pm
For the time being, yes – it requires a software installation. We made this decision when we started to develop Mendeley, as we felt that this was less of a barrier to entry than having to upload hundreds or thousands of PDFs to a website. It also meant that you could work with it offline (e.g. on a plane).
The idea is to take the huge PDF collection that researchers have already stored on their computers and turn it into a structured, searchable and citeable database with minimal effort. In the long run, we want to aggregate this data into a huge semantic database built on collaborative filtering principles – here’s a brief video explaining our long-term vision: http://www.mendeley.com/blog/2008/07/an-excellent-euroscience-adventure-part-ii/
If you decide to try it, please let us know what you think: http://feedback.mendeley.com
Thanks,
Victor
January 14, 2009 @ 10:15 pm
Thanks for the information, kind regards Dr Shock
January 15, 2009 @ 12:52 am
both these options look good. I’ll be looking into them:)
January 16, 2009 @ 11:41 am
I will also look into both options. In Endnote I coupled a lot of pdf’s to the references. I am wondering whether this will be automatically used in the software. Otherwise I have to do it all over again.
January 19, 2009 @ 10:10 pm
Hi Jan – sorry for the belated comment (I was travelling). As for your question: We’re working on it! See http://feedback.mendeley.com/pages/general/suggestions/80946-automatically-find-pdfs-link-them-to-imported-metadata
MedLib’s Round, First Edition « Laika’s MedLibLog
February 13, 2009 @ 3:06 am
[…] Papers). Dr. Shock didn’t make up his mind yet whether he prefers Mendeley or Labmeeting (described in another post) as an online library. But offline he uses Sente, which he finds absolutely perfect. A chimera […]
Medicine 2.0 Blog Carnival Edition #37 | Health Blogs Observatory
February 22, 2009 @ 11:28 am
[…] the carers in developing countries the power of evidence either at no cost or greatly reduced costs Labmeeting – a social bookmarking site to manage and share journal articles TrialX – free service to enable […]
May 18, 2010 @ 1:30 pm
Thanks, I will try it, seem interesting.