Labmeeting Social Network for Scientists

Labmeeting

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.

Walter van den Broek