Nature Has a Graphical Abstracts Problem

Or I should say, it had a problem. The most annoying thing about Nature journals, not including Nature Chemistry, is they do not have a graphical abstract associated with their rss feed or even in their Table of Contents. However, I made a hack to view Nature with an associated graphical abstract over at ChemFeeds.

link: Nature via ChemFeeds

I also went ahead and made it for all the other Nature journals.

• Nature
• Nature Chemistry (actually already had this one, but including it for completeness.)
• Nature Physics
• Nature Neuroscience
• Nature Nanotechnology
• Nature Cell Biology
• Nature Medicine
• Nature Methods
• Nature Biotechnology
• Nature Immunology
• Nature Materials
• Nature Chemical Biology
• Nature Genetics

If you happen to be a Nature lover you can see them all with this link: All Nature.

If some of the feeds don’t have many abstracts within them it is because they are very new and more abstracts will be added automatically as Nature updates their AOP feeds.

Update: PNAS ADDED!

Update 2: Science Added.

Mitch

Subscribe to the comments for this post

Most Popular Chemistry Papers 2010 (1/3)

There are finally enough people visiting ChemFeeds (~150/day) that metrics like most accessed chemistry paper might actually be statistically significant information. So below I present the top two most clicked on abstracts from ChemFeeds for the first third of 2010.

First Place: Emil Knoevenagel and the Roots of Aminocatalysis
by Benjamin List in Angewandte Chemie International Edition
(DOI: 10.1002/anie.200906900)

2nd Place: Total Synthesis of the N,C-Coupled Naphthylisoquinoline Alkaloids Ancistrocladinium A and B and Related Analogues
by Gerhard Bringmann, Tanja Gulder†, Barbara Hertlein, Yasmin Hemberger and Frank Meyer in Journal of American Chemical Society
(DOI: 10.1021/ja9097687)

Some Notes on the metrics. This information probably says more about the people visiting ChemFeeds than the quality of the papers. It would appear ChemFeeds visitors skewer heavily towards the organic synthetics. Perhaps with the recent addition of being able to click on category feeds like all materials and all physical feeds it’ll balance out.

Mitch

Subscribe to the comments for this post

Is Chemistry Incompatible with Web 2.0?

(This post is in response to the April 19 editorial in C&E News.  For the response to the May 10 editorial, click here)

A recent ChemJobber post notes that C&E News Editor-in-Chief Rudy Baum‘s editorials sometimes have a tendency to approach the controversial – and sometimes the purely political.  I wanted to discuss this weeks editorial which threatens to call into question much of my online existence (sorry, Mitch.  If Rudy’s right, I think you’re about to spontaneously e-implode).

In this week’s editorial, “The Limits of Web 2.0,” Baum decries the cliché “information wants to be free” for both its out-of-context usage (the full quote says information wants to be expensive because it is valuable and free because the cost of information dissemination is shrinking almost hourly – thus a struggle) and for its lunacy (information can’t wish for anything – it’s inanimate).  Rather, Baum says that it’s people who wish that information would be free.  I’d amend Baum’s correction slightly.  People really want information to be free and readily accessible.  I’d argue public libraries have long made most information “free,” if you were willing to do the legwork to get it.

But the bulk of Baum’s editorial promotes Jaron Lanier’s book You are Not a Gadget: A Manefesto, and summarizes Lanier’s main points, namely that the wisdom of crowds can be dangerous and science should be loath to adopt web 2.0 ideals.  Lanier points out that around the turn of century, a “torrent (a word hijacked by the web 2.0 crowd -ed.) of petty designs sometimes called web 2.0″ flooded the web.  And through the use of web 2.0, we apparently are losing sight of the trees for the forest, er, the taggers for the cloud.

Baum writes in his editorial (cross-posted for free on the web 2.0 CENtral Science blog, natch), “The essence of what Lanier is saying is that individuals are important and that we’re losing sight of that at our own peril in elevating the wisdom of the crowd to a higher plane than the creativity of a single person.”  That is, we are valuing the cloud more than the individuals, when the cloud can’t exist – and has no meaning - without the existence of the individuals.  Lanier notes that collective intelligence can be used well, but only when guided by individuals who can direct the course of the hive mind and help steer clear of common groupthink pitfalls.

But the most interesting quote comes near then end, when Baum quotes Lanier as saying that scientific communities “achieve quality through a cooperative process that includes checks and balances, and ultimately rests on a foundation of goodwill and ‘blind’ elitism.”  I’m not really sure what that means…

But to Lanier’s thesis that science ought to be wary of embracing web 2.0 and its ideals, I find it interesting that Baum writes his editorial at C&E News, the magazine of the ACS, whose flagship publication, the Journal of the American Chemical Society, has featured a JACSβ page for some time now.  The same C&E News whose blog has become so popular that it had to split off into several child blogs.  Where each post for each ACS article has links to share the article on one of several social networking sites.  Where scientists can now browse their favorite article on their iphones with ACSMobile.  While perhaps late to the party in some areas, the American Chemical Society has certainly ‘logged on’ to web 2.0 as a way to export content to the web-savvy scientist.

Plus, we have our own Mitch, a one man walking encapsulation of web 2.0.  His most successful application is, in my opinion, the chemical forums, which typically sees between 8,000 and 11,000 visitors per day.  This blog seems to be a big hit, and his ChemFeeds is a one-stop source for your aggregated list of your favorite journals’ graphical abstracts.  All this innovation on Mitch’s part earned him an interview with David Bradley (of ScienceBase) in his chemistry WebMagazine, Reactive Reports.

There’s also the Chemistry Reddit as another outlet of chemistry news and notes.

In the inaugural issue of Nature Chemistry, the Nature Publishing Group recounted how they have completely bought into web 2.0 as a means of science communication – each issue of Nature Chemistry even features a roundup of their favorite posts from the chemical blogosphere (which reminds me, to the left, Mitch has also created an aggregated rss feed of several popular chemistry blogs).

And, of course, web 2.0 in the sciences has been discussed in the blogs several times over the years.  We have over 3 pages of posts categorized Web 2.0, mostly Mitch’s posts on new web 2.0 platforms he’s developed.  Jean-Claude Bradley writes about web 2.0 in response to a very interesting post at Nascent, a blog from the folks at Nature.

So, all of these prove that web 2.0 has been talked about many times in the context of science.  Has it worked?  With the exception of blogs, sadly I’m inclined to say no.  At least not yet.  And even with blogs (with the possible exception of All Things Metathesis, and In the Pipeline, though Derek isn’t allowed to talk about his work b/c of intellectual property issues), not a lot of academic or industry leaders are prone to blogging.  It’s not like we’re reading Phil Baran’s blog and getting inside his head on a daily basis.

Sure, there is a subculture of people who are active on the web 2.0 scene, but it surely hasn’t taken off as a medium for all chemists to enjoy.  It theoretically should.  Chemists are always benefited from communal sharing of results and information.  But there are still (and probably always will be) people who seem reluctant to join the new technological paradigm.  I like the way Timo Hannay words it in his post on Nascent,

“But it’s not up to the doubters to ‘get it’, it is up to those of us who support these developments to demonstrate their value. And if we can’t then they don’t deserve to be adopted and we don’t deserve to be heard.”

Especially if there are people at the position of Editor-in-Chief for arguably the top chemistry magazine denouncing the web 2.0 movement, clearly it has a ways to go before it will be appreciated by all to the point where web 2.0 is ‘taken for granted,’ where we don’t even realize what we’re doing when we post results and opinions via web 2.0 technologies.

Let’s get moving!

Subscribe to the comments for this post

ACS Mobile

Credit: Linda Wang/C&EN

ACS has released an app that streams new ACS graphical abstracts to your iphone. Unfortunately you have to pay $2.99 for the app. A free alternative I wrote can be found at the mobile site for ChemFeeds.

The nice thing about my version is it works for any mobile device that gets internet and not just iphones. It also covers RSC and Elsevier journals in addition to ACS. You can email article links to yourself for later reading and even leave comments on the abstracts. Admittedly the ACS version looks sleek, but iphones only apps are worthless for us Android users.

Link to C&EN’s ACS Mobile coverage: ACS Publications Go Mobile

Link to ChemFeeds Mobile: http://m.chemfeeds.com/

Note: If you are not a member of the smart phone community yet, you can still get your graphical abstracts fix at the regular ChemFeeds website: http://www.chemfeeds.com/

Mitch

Subscribe to the comments for this post

Major ChemFeeds Upgrade

I added a crowdsourcing component to ChemFeeds that allows users to vote-up chemistry papers they enjoy. For those uninitiated to ChemFeeds, the website displays the latest graphical abstracts from ACS, RSC, and Wiley. As all things involving crowdsourcing and chemists are unpopular, I doubt it’ll be used much. But enjoy anyways.

The upgrade of the website can be viewed here: Hot 100 Abstracts

Suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Update 1: Some parts of the website may not work with ie. :/

Mitch

Subscribe to the comments for this post

ACS PUBS Redesign Brings Chaos To the RSS Masses

The new ACS PUBS redesign is a great step forward for ACS. Unfortunately, it is causing havoc across the RSS landscape from looking at the recent blog postings at The Sceptical Chymist and Everyday Scientist. The root of the image problem seems to be the RSS feeds are calling .tif files even though they exist as .gif files in their respective folders (someone probably mistyped a ‘t’ for a ‘g’). Alas don’t fret, ChemFeeds is working just fine.  So if you want your graphical abstracts fix, head on over:

http://www.chemfeeds.com/

Edit 1: Actually the new ACS feeds seems to be causing greater than normal lag at ChemFeeds. Also, for some journals they are actually calling journal images from folders that have no images in them. So, although I’ve fixed them up as much as I can, I can’t create images in folders, but its better than nothing.

Edit 2: I’ve been going crazy looking over and pruning through their feeds that I generated this cool error shown below.

Edit 3: I just realized it says I’m from the University of Washington, I have no clue what is going wrong with their website now. As I’m connecting through Berkeley’s access.

Edit 4: Rachel has an update: About Those Feeds

Mitch

Subscribe to the comments for this post

Introducing ChemFeeds your Graphical Abstracts Portal

Decided to make a new website, ChemFeeds, where you can view pretty graphical chemical abstracts from various sources like JACS, Angewandte, JOCS, OrgLett, and a whole host of others. It even has the Angewandte puns^CBC, vis-à-vis OCB.

Feel free to roam around at the website, link is here:
http://www.chemfeeds.com/

Feedback and suggestions on how to make the website better and more useful for you, would be great.

Update 1: Permanent link can now be found in the top right header of this website. Which is an extension of the concept and scripts introduced here: Full Frontal JACS

Mitch

Subscribe to the comments for this post

Full Frontal JACS

The Journal of the American Chemical Society (JACS) has flirted with web 2.0 with it’s recent JACS β initiative. It has been warmly received around the blogosphere [CSB, TCB, CBC]. Although, I don’t have any complaints about the website, what I really wanted was less hand-holding and more of a shotgun approach to navigating through JACS online.

The nicest thing about thumbing through the print edition of JACS, is reading all the various chemistry that is outside your research tunnel-vision but still interesting.  If you go to the JACS homepage, here, you’ll see a list of 20 of the most recent articles, but not all of them! For example, 31 papers were added to ASAP today and only the last 20 are shown on their website, hardly a dire circumstance, but the fact is you miss some by using that setup. JACS also offers a nifty RSS feed of their articles, but I’ve never come across an RSS reader that’ll nicely format an active feed, 30+ submissions a day, in a format that will ever make me want to read it.

So how does one go about designing a more attractive JACS online browsing environment? Below is my attempt, it is as busy and attractive as a conference poster, but it lets you see a huge list of the most recently added papers to JACS ASAP.

The website parses through the JACS RSS feed. I was a bit worried about incorporating the graphical abstracts, but since they are included in the RSS feed, I’m going to claim fair use. The site isn’t pretty, but it gets the job done.

Here is a link for your viewing pleasure, Full Frontal JACS: http://www.chemfeeds.com/

Comments are always welcomed, but obviously this format is not for everyone.

Edit: A link to the site has been included in the links section to the right, towards the bottom under websites, titled Full Frontal JACS.

Update 1: Improved ACIE RSS feed

Update 2: Links edited to point to ChemFeeds instead of the simple script.

Mitch

Subscribe to the comments for this post