We – that is the SciPlore team and Hilah Geer (Head librarian at the Oslo School of Management) – need your help!
Hilah is a fan of SciPlore and for her research she wants to perform a user study (interviews) with some users of SciPlore MindMapping to understand how academics are using SciPlore MindMapping. The results will help us to understand how you are using the software and how we can improve it. Therefore, please, if you are an active academic user of Sciplore MindMapping, help us understanding how you work with SciPlore MindMapping. Participate in the 30minutes interviews and read on what Hilah has to tell you about the interviews:
Introductory Letter:
I am a seasoned academic librarian doing research in the field of Science & Technology Studies (STS). And I need your help. I have chosen SciPlore as my research object because of its brilliant combination of functionalities for academics. However, according to STS theory, it is not brilliant functionality that changes society; functionality cannot even really be brilliant on its own. It is brilliant use of functionality that counts.
I think the people at SciPlore would agree. Perhaps their secret is that they are not really concerned with creating software at all. They are concerned with facilitating your brilliant uses for evolving functionalities. That means that for me to understand SciPlore I need to understand how you are using it. Data on downloads and clicks, luckily enough for us humans, is not enough.
Academic institutions allow researchers enormous freedom in managing their personal libraries. Okay, perhaps there is a little neglect mixed in with the freedom, but either way you have undoubtedly fostered a rich information ecology on your personal computer. And you use SciPlore, which offers practical and logical functionality for managing and wrestling with ideas and texts in a digital environment. Much of this meaningful work is hidden, black boxed, while you work independently at your personal computer. It would be a great privilege for me and I believe of benefit for SciPlore to be able to conduct telephone interviews with active SciPlore users. Look under the proverbial hood so to speak. Who knows, it may even help you clarify some things for yourself.
Hilah Geer
Details about the study
About me:
I am been a librarian since the early 90s. I have worked at MIT, Harvard Business School, and a consulting firm in Berkeley, California among other places. Most recently I have moved to Norway and am the head librarian at the Oslo School of Management. I am exploring the field of Science & Technology Studies as a means of getting a better grasp on the role technology plays in my work. I would very much appreciate your help!
About the interviews:
Who will be interviewed: Anyone who is working in an academic/research environment who uses SciPlore to any extent with any regularity is valuable to my research. I will be interviewing as many of you as possible.
How will they be conducted: I personally will be conducting all of the interviews. They will be done either on Skype or via telephone. They will take 30 minutes. I will be more than willing to go more in depth if the interviewee is interested. Otherwise, I will protect your time and stick to 30 minutes.
What will they include: first I will want to gather standardized information: demographics, field of study, institution(s), hardware, software, and networked resources. Then I will have a series of questions to steer a discussion of how you use SciPlore and why.
When: The main interview period will be between May 2. and June 24 (There is a degree of flexibility as regards dates). I will be available for interviews on weekends but weekdays are preferable.
Conditions: Of course the results of the interviews will be made entirely anonymous. Upon arrangement of the interviews you will be given a signed terms of agreement that you can choose to alter if you wish. All processed anonymous data will be shared with SciPlore, unless requested otherwise.
Send an email to survey@sciplore.org to arrange an interview or ask a question about them. And Thanks!
One month ago we asked our users to send us suggestions for a new name for SciPlore MindMapping. We got a few dozens of ideas and would like to thank all the participants very very much for their great and creative ideas! In our team, we had lots of discussion about the pros and cons of all the names. Eventually, we decided that “Docear” was the best idea. Why? Well, it`s short (six letters/two syllables), the first letter lies quite early in the alphabet, “Docear” is easy to type on a keyboard, we believe the name is quite easy to remember, and, most importantly, we like the meaning: “Docear” pronounces the same way as “Dog-ear” which means kind of a “bookmark” (in German: Eselsohr) and includes the abbreviation for document (doc) which both represents what the software is all about (managing documents). Also, “docear” is the is the first person, singular, present subjunctive, passive from the Latin “docere” meaning “to teach”, which is also not too bad as a meaning for the software.
What do you think about that name?
More information about the new Docear will come soon (a month or two). Meanwhile, if you like, help us creating a logo and web design. Just Send us your drafts to “feedback @sciplore .org”.
Beta 15 of SciPlore MindMapping is out. The major new feature is the literature recommendation module. Based on your mind maps SciPlore MindMapping provides you with literature recommendations that can be downloaded immediately and for free. For this feature we use our upcoming new service Mr. DLib which has several millions of articles indexed from the Web. I have to admit, recommendations are not really good right now because we use a very simple algorithm. However, recommendations will become much better in near future, promised  .
And there are more enhancements. The monitoring directory works with relative paths, BibTeX files from Mendeley with multiple links can be read, and several bug fixes were made. Here is the complete list:
- New: Literature recommendations with free full-text link in incoming window
- New: Automatic Web Service check (message if an old version is used)
- New: Logging of recommendations, usage data, and incoming window status
- New: “Import Annotations from PDFs” is now valid globally (not only for drag and drop but, e.g. for monitoring directory)
- New: Monitoring node works with relative path, too
- New: Overview mind map on first start
- Improved: Identification of comments in PDF files improved
- Improved: Behaviour of icons in incoming window
- Improved: BibTeX files from Mendeley with multiple files can now be read
- Fixed: Cancelling monitoring update did not work on all computers (continued in background)
- Fixed: Renaming imported bookmarks did not work before saving a mind map
- Fixed: Licence was not shown when selected in menu
- Fixed: Ref key sometimes wasn`t assigned to imported comments (bookmarks worked)
Let us know what you think of the new version and make a comment here in the Blog.
I just wondered which email provider students and scientists prefer. To find out I wrote a little script which analyzed the domain names of SciPlore MindMapping`s newsletter subscribers (there are 1375 of them). And, the answer is: Gmail (Google Mail) is the most preferred email provider. 42% of all subscribers had a Gmail (or Googlemail) address. The next most popular email provider was Yahoo! with only 8.9%. This little graphic shows the complete results. Of course this is not representative for all scientists but anyway, I thought I share the results with you. Maybe there is someone finding them interesting.
Over a year ago we started the development of SciPlore MindMapping. So far the response in the academic community was overwhelming. We get almost daily emails from users telling us how much they like the software and download counts are steadily increasing. Now, I am very pleased to announce that in the near future we will continue the development of SciPlore MindMapping as an independent tool from SciPlore. The focus of “SciPlore MindMapping” differs just too much from the goal of “SciPlore” and despite, the name “SciPlore MindMapping” is just too long anyway.
So, what we do need is a new name for SciPlore MindMapping and we want you help finding it!
There are few (but tricky) demands to the new name: Read more Help us finding a new name for “SciPlore MindMapping”
When we started the development of SciPlore MindMapping about a year ago we decided to use FreeMind as code base. That means we used FreeMind`s source code, modified it slightly, and added some new features. It was a straight forward decision: for many years, FreeMind was bascially the standard choice if you wanted a free open source mind mapping software and it was written in Java, our preferred programing language. However, time is changing and FreeMind unfortunately is not. Since a long time, the FreeMind team is releasing new versions very slowly, not to say the development of FreeMind almost pauses.
Therefore we decided to switch to Freeplane as code base in near future (around July 2011). Read more Good by FreeMind, welcome FreePlane
We added some new features to SciPlore MindMapping Beta 14 that should help you a lot in managing your academic literature: Many users told us they would like not only to import bookmarks but comments and highlighted text from PDFs to their mind maps. Well, this is now possible . However, importing highlighted text is pretty… far from being perfect. Currently, it works only with PDFs edited with Skim. Anyway, importing comments works quite well. In addition, more BibTeX attributes are shown in the mind map (journal, year and authors in addition to bibtexkey and title). Also the BibTeX processing is more tolerant which makes it easier to use SciPlore MindMapping with manually created BibTeX files and other reference mangers than JabRef. And, we fixed several bugs. As a consequence all export formats should work now (e.g. HTML, XHTML, Java Applet, Flash, PNG, PDF, …). Here is the complete list of our changes:
- New: Comments in PDFs and highlighted text can be imported
- New: Show more BibTeX attributes in mind map (author, year, journal/conference)
- New: Icons for most important actions in incoming folder window added
- Improved: BibTeX processing is more tolerant
- Improved: Incoming folder window remembers width
- Fixed: Update reference keys did not work if one BibTeX key in BibTeX file was empty
- Fixed: Some export formats did not work properly
- Fixed: Status window lost focus on click on background
- Fixed: If monitoring directory was non-existent, an exception occured
- Fixed: Reference key was not assigned if file name had special chars
Download Beta 14 Read more Beta 14 of SciPlore MindMapping is out: Import comments & highlighted text; more BibTeX attributes, Export works now, …
Beta 12 has many new features and improvements
- New: Incoming PDFs are now displayed in seperate window
- New: ‘Import All’ and ‘Import New’ Bookmarks
- Improved: Update of the monitoring node is now MUCH, MUCH faster
- Improved: Better understandable error messages when the web service is not available (for mind map backup, user validation etc.)
- Improved: Logging events are sent up to three times if connection breaks
- Improved: Better exception handling if no internet connection exists
- Improved: Icons are now in higher resolution Read more Beta 12 and 13 of SciPlore MindMapping released
Are you using Google Scholar? For finding scientific literature? For obtaining citation counts and publication lists of researchers? Have you ever thought about how trustworthy the information is you get on Google Scholar?
My colleague and I performed several tests with Google Scholar and found out that it is really easy to fool Google Scholar. You can easily increase citation counts of articles and therefore increase the article’s rankings. You can easily add invisible keywords to articles and make the article appear relevant for searches it actually isn’t. You can also create complete non-sensical articles with the paper generator SciGen and make Google Scholar index them. And you can place any kind of advertisement in manipulated articles and make users of Google Scholar downloading them.
Of course, our results do not mean that you cannot trust Google Scholar at all or shouldn’t use it at all. Despite our results I am using Google Scholar frequently – imho it’s still the best academic search engine on the market. However, as with all other search engines you should be aware that there might be spam and manipulated information and you should really be carefully using citation counts from Google Scholar. Maybe there are no, or little, manipulations right now. But the more citation counts from Google Scholar are used for performance evaluations, the higher the incentive for researchers to manipulate them (and, as said, it’s really easy).
What I am interested in now is: What’s you opinion on this subject? Have you every found something on Google Scholar that was suspicious? Please let me know.
If you are interested in more information read the full article, titled “Academic Search Engine Spam and Google Scholar’s Resilience Against it”, here.
Update 2010/12/31:
We got a few questions when we did the experiments on Google Scholar (unfortunately we didn’t state that in the paper). The answer: Between early 2009 and mid of 2009. We first submitted the paper to WWW2010 in November 2009 but it was rejected. Well, and then it took… many many month (and edits) before the Journal of Electronic Publishing finally accepted and published the paper .
Update 2011/01/02:
There is another really interesting article about spamming Google Scholar: Cyril Labbe created a fake researcher called Ike Antkare and made him one of the most cited authors of all time (according to Google Scholar). Read the article here.
Today we released Beta 11 of SciPlore MindMapping. There is a number
of new features, namely:
- New: Copy several BibTeX keys from different nodes at once
- New: Open the folder that contains the software’s log files via the menu
- New: Keyboard shortcuts for the most important functions
- New: Backup reminder (user is asked to activate backup after 10th software start)
- New: Information retrieval reminder
- New: Usage statistics implemented
- New: More options for PDF monitoring (update automatically on opening a mind map and read (no) sub directories)
- Improved: PDF Bookmarks Read more Beta 11 of SciPlore MindMapping released
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