Labmeeting Blog

One of the things we hope Labmeeting will help people do more effectively is find papers that are relevant to their research.  This is a challenging problem that needs to be attacked from multiple directions.  There are a lot of interesting things one can do through active recommendation, analysis of citations, and human-generated or automated categorization.  The approach I want to focus on today, though, is quite basic, but nevertheless extremely powerful. Specifically, I want to talk about collection sharing.

All of us in biomedical research have some colleagues who work on research subjects closely related to our own area of interest.  This is especially the case because most of us work in labs that have broad overarching goals and house overlapping projects that tackle different aspects of the same system.  As a result many of us find out about papers that are very important to our own research through our lab mates.  I’ve got a friend in lab who is really great about always emailing me a copy of any paper he comes across that he thinks might be useful to me. I have to guiltily admit that I am much less useful to him in that respect, though that may perhaps partly be because I don’t browse nearly as many abstracts as he does.

In any case, the question is: why should you need to rely on some friend or co-worker of yours going above and beyond to bring a paper she has discovered to your attention?  What if you and she had a way of passively and automatically sharing the papers you each discovered with each other, so that you could each benefit from the other’s efforts to stay up on the literature?

Labmeeting makes this new method of paper discovery possible through collection sharing.  Every user of Labmeeting gets to build his own private, searchable collection of PDFs and bibliographic citations.  If he wants to, though, he can mutually share collections with a colleague, or he can join a lab and share his collection with everyone else in the lab.

Collection sharing radically alters the way one searches the literature.  Suddenly, every individual has dozens of other people toiling away on his behalf to collect papers that might be relevant to him (because they’re actually working to collect the papers for themselves).  All he has to do is navigate over to their collections, and he can perform searches for keywords or authors that matter to him in groupings of articles that have already selected by human beings for their relevance to research related to his.

This approach to paper search has the potential to work far better than the smartest algorithm one could devise for searching the entirety of the literature.  Even the best general search engine would have a very hard time replicating the selectivity of your dozens of friends and colleagues, who are real human beings making decisions about which papers are interesting enough to be added to their collections.  Very often we aren’t even sure what search terms would be best for finding the result we want, and in that case it’s especially important to be able to lean on the vetting provided by other human beings, rather than relying on a machine to figure out what we mean when our language is imprecise.

I think the most interesting thing about this is that there’s a stark difference between searching the web and searching the academic literature.  It would be really hard to make a search tool for the whole internet based on this model of friends and bookmarking, because there are just too many different kinds of things that I might want to look for on the internet.  I go on Google to find the phone numbers of pizzerias, explanations of black hole physics, and the addresses of distant relatives.  It’s too much of a mess.

In contrast, researchers frequently are interested in searching a fairly coherent subspace of the academic literature for articles related to narrowly-defined subject areas. I study protein folding theory.  I have a colleague who studies protein misfolding experimentally in yeast, and I am 100% certain that his paper collection is a better place for me to find the articles that matter most to me than the collection of someone else who is working on sequencing the genome of different strains of malaria.

The other thing I like about collection sharing is that it works locally.  None of this nonsense of waiting until there are a gazillion people using the site before the “wisdom of the crowds” can be unleashed.  If you can get a half dozen of your colleagues to collect papers on Labmeeting and share what they collect with you, you will already be sitting in the driver’s seat of the most powerful search engine for scientific literature related to your own work.

We’ve got a lot of other ideas here at Labmeeting for how to help people search the literature better, but we started by building collection sharing because it’s simple, easy, and has the potential to be much more powerful than any other clever thing we might come up with.  Build a paper collection for yourself on Labmeeting, and invite your colleagues and lab mates to do the same. It’s going to make science a lot easier.