Usefulness of social networking for scientists: greatly exaggerated?

A study of research patterns in life scientists found that (duh) they all have different patterns of accessing information. Of course we knew this, or at least suspected it, but I can’t help but be pleased that the British Library found space for this news on its Press Room page.  It shores up the notion that libraries and ‘resource centres’ need to be flexible with different users.

“Researchers use informal and trusted sources of advice from colleagues, rather than institutional service teams, to help identify information sources.” Yes they do-another reason why perhaps an information professional must inject themselves into the teams with which they work, rather than sideline themselves. Depending on how an organisation is set up, this can be quite natural and easy (if one’s desk is ‘integrated’ into the team area, for example, as proximity tends to predict positive regard) or difficult, if the information team is isolated or in a ‘bricks and mortar’ library away from the clients.

I thought it interesting that the report highlighted that social networking tools (blogs, podcasts, social bookmarking, etc) had not proven terribly appealing to life scientists.  The full report elaborates that, firstly, “there is not the critical mass of individuals using such services to make it worthwhile” to use them to “enhance research”. Secondly, and I almost choked while reading this, “the time required in order to become a proficient user is prohibitive.” Don’t give me that. These are highly trained people who, as it says in the next sentence, may use “grid technologies” and “an intricate array of analytical tools” in their day to day work.

What do you think about the ‘not enough time’ to learn simple, user friendly web-based software argument?

I really think that the report should have written: “the scientists can’t be bothered with this social networking stuff because of general complacency and then notion that Twitter and the like will only be around for a few years before we get something new, so, again, why bother?”

Nor is this attitude unique to the life sciences. I know someone very influential, at a Canadian charity, who is crying out to use Twitter for fundraising and marketing. But she is sadly also ‘too busy’.

In other news, the “Disasters Emergency Committee (DEC) has acknowledged that social media has contributed significantly to the income it has raised for its current appeal. In the first week of the DEC’s appeal for Indonesia, the Philippines and Vietnam, over £3 million was donated,” mainly via the BBC website, Twitter and Facebook.

A spokesperson from the DEC said “the biggest risk we faced was not that we might make a mistake [with using Twitter], it was that we would miss a chance to help save more lives.”

Check out #casestudieslife on Twitter to contribute to the discussion about how researchers use and access information (or not!).

Size matters

This is a cool little toy, if you’ve ever wondered about the relative sizes of a grain of rice to a skin cell, a lysosome to a carbon atom; play with the slider underneath the graphic. It’s from the University of Utah.

NHS Evidence; Google without the good bits

Our other Alan wrote a piece a couple of posts ago on, amongst other things, this article in the Nursing Times. Basically it’s a press release for NICE, written by an implementation advisor for said large, powerful organisation. It describes how NHS Evidence will be so very useful for nurses, and I suppose it could be argued that it’s useful because the odd nurse (not literally you understand) may be flicking through the magazine, scan the article, and go and try out a bit of evidence hunting themselves. Surely a happy outcome.

But I fear that our odd nurse will only try out NHS Evidence once, maybe even twice, but probably not a third time. Why? Well, according to an issue of the Eyes on Evidence Newsletter (more PR from NICE) the top five most frequently used search terms were 1) asthma; 2) prostate AND cancer; 3) evidence; 4) flu OR influenza; 5) breastfeeding, so we get an idea of the level of sophistication behind most searches. Let’s try the top one, asthma. 5026 hits, including 516 guidelines and 1627 drug information pieces. You get the general idea. The first ‘guideline’ is  “Guidelines for the prevention, identification and management of occupational asthma: evidence review and recommendations”, a pretty hardcore 88 page PDF of an evidence review, complete with evidence tables, from the British Occupational Health Research Foundation. Not at all helpful, I would’ve thought, to our odd yet eager nurse. If s/he wanted a good review of what to with someone with asthma surely they’d just go to an evidence synthesis product, such as Clinical Evidence, CKS, Dynamed or the Map of Medicine.

The problem is that NHS Evidence’s obsession with Google means that their search engine suffers exactly the same problem as Google (too many hits) but does not have the same saving grace (that the one you really want is at the top). Plus, and this is still really the crux of my problem, I still don’t have a clue who NHS Evidence is meant to be for – neither, I think, do the people behind NHS Evidence. “All things to all people” often ends up as nothing to no-one.

Tweeting – the new medical slang?

Coverage from BBC news of an article in JAMA on tweeting medical students.

No great shock to read that medical students (in common with swathes of the population at large) may not always think through the wisdom of what they post.  Given the responsibility held by medics it has the potential to be the new medical slang scandal with lots of angst in the media.

More interesting perhaps is a snap shot of online participation by medical students

The majority of respondents were daily users of the Internet for e-mail and similar communications (99%; 70/71), as well as Web surfing (71%; 50/70). Web 2.0 use was less common. Most respondents reported never or rarely using social networking sites (68%; 48/71), reading blogs (79%; 56/71), posting on blogs (87%; 61/70), reading wikis (69%; 48/70), or writing on wikis (91%; 64/70).

Slightly confusing presentation of the stats.  I am not sure I agree with the interpretation – it would help to know the levels of never vs rarely.  It would also help to know what the alternative statements were – often, daily, hourly?  9% writing on wikis at least more than rarely seems strikingly high to me given the usual levels of online participation with many more viewing than writing.

Clinical Reader: Malicious or just stupid?

I’d never heard of Hanlon’s razor before. Apparently it is an adage that reads “Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity”. I rather like that; I’ll have to remember it. It is a nice way to look at the world, as we can all be stupid sometimes. Take for example the new company Clinical Reader. The company has an online product that basically seems to be an RSS reader but that they decide which RSS feeds they’re going to track, not you. I came across it a few days ago as some clinicians were discussing what a good service it was on some mailing list. Well, I thought, that’s clinicians for you. The product didn’t seem bad enough to comment on, but likewise certainly didn’t seem interesting enough to comment on either – at least not from my point of view. So I thought to myself “well, our handsome and fragrant readership will probably come across it soon enough, and they can make their own perfectly balanced minds up about it…”, and left it there.

But today I see another twist on the Clinical Reader story, and what happens when you get involved in social networking tools without really knowing what you’re doing. The thing was that Nicole Dettmar (evidently a fan of The Prisoner) had pointed out in her blog that Clinical Reader were implying that they had been awarded ‘five stars’ by institutions such as the British Library, the NLM, Imperial College, The Lancet etc. She pointed out to them on Twitter than the NLM does not endorse anything, and that they ought to do something about it, and promptly received a reply threatening legal action (I love the use of ‘kindly’):

I mean to say, what a stupid (or malicious) thing to do. Of course everyone picked up on it and they received a barrage of tweets and blog commentary. As of writing they have since backed down, which they should do because they are plainly in the wrong, saying “We are keen to engage the twitter community the tweet made by a junior member of the team was poor judgment”. However the “five stars according to…” graphic remains throughout their site once you get past the first page.

Malicious or stupid? You decide. Either way it doesn’t reflect well on Clinical Reader.

Using Twitter to track disease outbreaks

A few months ago I wrote a short post on Phil Baumann’s 140 healthcare uses for Twitter. Well, Chris Thorman over on Software Advice has written a longer piece on the potential of Twitter for identifying and tracking disease outbreaks in real-time. To get some vaguely reliable data from Twitter, rather than the mess of misinformation with the occasional piece of truth thrown in which is Twitter as of today (oh, cynic that I am), it would  be necessary to have a uniform set of diagnostic codes, “hash tags” and a proper authentication system, e.g. as Chris writes:

“…This adoption by doctors would need include a verification system that only allows trusted or authenticated users to tweet about information contained in the EMRs. What we’re trying to avoid is aggregating a whole mess of data related to a particular disease. Authenticating users to make sure they are who they say they are avoids this problem. With a uniform set of diagnosis codes and a proper authentication system, suddenly the trending data sent out by these verified doctors’ tweets goes from speculative to extremely reliable.”

I do actually think that Twitter or a similar technology could be very useful in tracking the early signs of a condition, or any other “rare event” pattern. In fact I’d be amazed if we weren’t using it this way very soon. What is required however, as always, in some kind of central, trustworthy institution to organise, analyse, study and disseminate the data that comes in, as well as ensuring the diagnoses are correct and not just false positives. That’s the hard part, not some Dr in a clinic in Great Yarmouth tweeting that one of their patients has a sniffle. Anyway, take a look and see what you think. Twitter fans will like it at least. Another step towards world domination.

fefoo – not another search engine

I’m not sure why it’s called fefoo, but it’s quite a nice little tool. It’s not another search engine. Rather, it’s a tool through which you can search a whole range of different search engines – Google, Bing, Yahoo, of course, but also many of those funny little ones you’ve never heard of, like Viewzi (fun graphical interface), Spezify (yet more fun graphical interfaces) and LexxeAlpha (no fun graphical interfaces, but rather powered by “advanced natural language technology”, though still returns Wikipedia first).  The search pages give a little tool bar at the top that allows you quickly to try your search in another search engine. You can also look for blogs, images, torrents, people, movies etc. It’s all quite useful, to tell the truth. And finally, if you’re truly hardcore, rather than specifying in the drop down menus that you want to search Yahoo, say, you can use command line searches, in this case, for a search on ‘Tom Baker’, “:yahoo Tom Baker”, though unfortunately it does not seem that you can combine command lines searches, e.g. “:yahoo :images Tom Baker” for, you guessed it, images of Tom Baker. Oh well. It’s a nice little tool nonetheless, and helps ensure you venture beyond just Google from time to time.

Promotion envy

I regularly suffer from promotion envy when other folk have much slicker promotional materials / concepts than me.  The latest dose has been caused by this lovely campaign in the states promoting the public library service – Geek the Library (alerted by this post at It’s all good). 

One of the key things for me is the combination of linking peoples passions to the ability to learn more about them through the library.  The use of web 2.0 type sites gives a way to be involved and hopefully generate some discussion and improve awareness amongst a younger audience.

As an avid public library user I would love to see something like this in the UK.  I have geeked all manner of things via my public library. 

On the health informatics side I noticed that NHS Evidence recruited a whole stack of marketing / promotion / brand management types.  They will almost certainly have more capacity in this area than NHS Libraries have ever even contemplated (more promotion envy).   Should there be a lesson for all parts of the library community?

Bing – But It’s Not Google

Attempts to topple Google continue. Microsoft are coming in with Bing (the name has already been criticised). Why do they bother, we ask? I really want to use other search engines, as I never like monopolies, but whenever I try Live Search or Exalead or Yahoo or Ask it always ends up, if not in tears, then a sad retreat to Google. It’s not that I don’t like Google, it’s just I wish somebody would give us a half decent alternative. Evidently, search is hard to do well.

Anyway, I have two thoughts. Firstly is that no-one is naive enough to think that Bing can topple Google, at least not in the short or medium term. But at the moment MS only get about 8% of the search market, and even if they can increase that up to, say, 16%, that’ll still double their income from selling search associated advertising, and that’s a pretty damned big market; the $100 million they’ve allegedy put aside for marketing Bing might not look like such a large amount once the new income starts rolling in.

Secondly, it appears they’re not fighting Google on the “who’s got the best algorithm” front. Google have, and they’ve got the know-how and momentum to keep it there. Rather they’re using semantic search through their aquisition of Powersoft a while ago and will target users after specific, query based information in the world of shopping, travel, health and locating local businesses. This could work, as Bing only has to be better than Google in one area to begin with. If, say, you decide that Bing is more helpful when trying online shopping than Google Product Search, then you’ll come back to Bing time and time again and slowly, maybe, after time you’ll start to use Bing for other queries, even if it’s only nearly as good as Google. New search engines going head to head against Google tend to lose, badly. I guess that’s why Microsoft are encouraging people to use Bing for specific types of query first, rather than just as a replacement of Google as your general search engine.

Well, we’ll see how it goes. I hope they do OK. I don’t really care who it is, but I’d like to see a choice to Google. Actually talking of search engines, has anyone tried Wolfram|Alpha? Nothing if not ambitious…  Wolfram|Alpha’s long-term goal is to make all systematic knowledge immediately computable and accessible to everyone. We aim to collect and curate all objective data; implement every known model, method, and algorithm; and make it possible to compute whatever can be computed about anything.

NHS Evidence is here

What do people think of the new look? It combines a Google-esque search with a cleaner display of the content. NICE also has a new website… 

Meanwhile I’ve been catching up on the twitter collective of what happened at CILIP last night. The elephant in the room being if branches and groups are delivering what people want from CILIP and CILIP aren’t interested in new technologies (or even simple things like email provision to said groups and electronic payment systems) then why shouldn’t branches and groups become independent? Funding of course is an issue but there is this thing called sponsorship and much of the running ‘costs’ are already being carried by individuals on committees setting up blogs and websites as well as events that feed into the needs of members (and naughty non-members or subscribers such as I).