Jan. 28, 2008 | You’re a life science researcher looking for experts in your scientific niche. Beyond your immediate circle of colleagues, how can you quickly find and connect with others who share your expertise?
A new online social network – BioMedExperts.com – could vastly simplify your search and help you connect with others in your field.
Launched this month by Collexis, a developer of high-definition search and knowledge discovery software, BioMedExperts.com is pre-populated with profiles of 1.5 million life science researchers and their published work, and is updated continually so researchers themselves need do nothing to keep their
profiles current. It uses publicly available information from MedLine (the digital version of PubMed) and other sources to build its database, and is available at no cost to biomedical professionals.
Collexis, with U.S. headquarters in Columbia, S.C., specializes in concept-based expert profiling. Among its clients are Johns Hopkins and Harvard, and last week Collexis announced it will build an “advanced expert profiling system” for the 8000+ researchers at the National Institutes of Health.
Stephen Leicht, chief operating officer of Collexis, compares BioMedExperts to the social networks MySpace and LinkedIn in its functionality and ability to connect people. But BioMedExperts goes a step further in that it automatically keeps profiles updated. “There is no pre-populated social network like this anywhere, and we’ve done an exhaustive review,” Leicht says.
By taking the profile of documents and adding together all the documents written by the same person, BioMedExperts creates a profile of that person. Leicht says this profile “is often much more robust than even a resume or bio might be.”
The technology underlying BioMedExperts and other Collexis profiling systems is based on digital profiles of key ideas– so-called fingerprints – culled from various publicly available sources. Anything published in mainstream biomedical publications over the last 10 years has been picked up and indexed, according to Leicht.
“We take pieces of text -- from websites, publications, transcripts, documents from document management repositories -- and we apply controlled vocabularies -- thesauri, ontologies, taxonomies, etc. – to them,” says Leicht. “So we have in our databases a profile for each document the system has ingested, and it automatically assigns concepts relevant to particular documents, as well as a weight for each concept.”
To the user, this weight, or relevance, is represented in a visual interface by a colored bar. The longer the bar, the more relevant the document and its authors to the searcher’s objective.
The landing page can be reconfigured but essentially it shows what’s going on in the user's field of research, the latest relevant articles or grants, what one's immediate coauthors are engaged in – and also shows random experts in the user's network and what they’re working on. It further filters the information in numerous ways: by topic and sub-topic, co-authors, number of publications, affiliation, geographic location, and more.
Once the user has found the profile of the researcher he'd like to contact, he can contact them through the network and invite them to join his community.
BioMedExperts also shows first-, second-, and third-level coauthors a user may “share” with the person he’s trying to connect with. If he's connected to them through a common coauthor, he can reach out to them through that individual.
For example, the user may be connected three levels away to Researcher Z – in other words has written at least one paper with researcher X; X has written one paper with Y; and Y has written one paper with Z. For any person in the database, he can click “more” and see all potential connections.