In response to this item and its follow-on discussion, Alf Eaton shows how you can, in fact, discover the (open access) scientific commentary surrounding an (open access) scientific article. Outstanding!
Here’s the interactive version of the service. You can feed it an URL, a DOI, or a PubMed id, and it fetches conversations about that item from Postgenomic, PubMed, Connotea, and Scopus.
I took the liberty of converting this service into a bookmarklet which I’ve labeled sc (scientific conversations). It’s the analog to my standard dc bookmarklet (del.icio.us conversations) and bc bookmarklet (bloglines conversations).
WordPress won’t let me post javascript: URLs so I can’t post the installable versions of these bookmarkets, but here they are in textual form:
sc: javascript:location.href=’http://scintilla.nature.com/conversations?uri=’+encodeURIComponent(location.href)
dc: javascript:location.href=’http://del.icio.us/url?v=2&url=’+encodeURIComponent(location.href)
bc: javascript:location.href=’http://bloglines.com/search?q=Bcite:’+encodeURIComponent(location.href)
If you make a new bookmarket, edit its properties, and copy one of these javascript: thingies into the URL or Location box, you’ll be good to go.
So, this is great! Now if I’m visiting a PLoS Medicine article I can just click dc, bc, and sc to assess how both the general-interest and scientific communities are reacting to it.
Thanks Alf!
Thanks for the bookmarklets – I’ll add them to the page tomorrow. Bloglines actually has a search API, so that might be one to add for the ‘serious’ but non-science blog discussion.
Scopus? really? an advertisement for Elsevier? Interesting in all of the discussions for open-ness. That serves me just fine because I have access to Scopus through my institutional subscription (right click, reload through proxy using the libx toolbar).
Its great to see it all in one page like that :). It should also be possible to get the information (comments and ratings) available for PLoS ONE papers from the PLoS ONE site in the same way (with DOI).
Jon…thanks. This is REALLY cool. Both the bookmarklets specifically, as well as (yet another) concrete example of how much sense wiring this sort of thing up makes. Really, really nice.
You have been blogging absolutely outstanding material lately :-)
Thanks a lot.
—
Parag
Alf being awesome again.
I actually ran into a little trouble with the javascript code in Firefox. It seems like the browser chokes on “slanted apostrophes” (’ – what’s the proper name for that?). Replacing them with single quotes (‘) works a-ok.
Well, as you can tell from how my previous comment is displayed, WordPress automagically turns single quotes into ‘s!