New SciFinder Scholar Features

SciFinder now has three interesting new collaboration features: Tags, My Connections, and Comments. All three are Web 2.0 features of sorts, allowing SciFinder Scholar users to interact within, and add content to, the site.

The Tags feature enables you to add specific references in SciFinder Scholar to a "tagged" list that is saved by the database and can be viewed, even after you close the research session during which you tagged the reference. This is a lot like SciFinder Scholar's Saved Answer Set feature -- but with a twist. The Tags feature allows you to invite others at your home institution to share tags. In other words, any faculty, staff, or student at Western Michigan University could invite any other WMU faculty, staff, or student to share Tags. Once you share Tags with someone, the two of you can access each other's list of Tagged references.

You can invite others to share by using the second new feature, My Connections. This feature allow you to send invitations to share your Tagged list, to respond to others that have invited you to share, and to view the list of people with which you are already sharing.

The last feature, Comments, allows you to attach comments to specific reference in SciFinder Scholar. While you can view a list of all of the reference you have tagged, oddly, you can only view references with comments if that reference is also tagged.

I've played around a bit with these new features, and they look like they have a lot of potential for researchers working in groups, professors or TAs using reference as instruction materials, or anyone that simply wants a easy way to share a reference.

But, there two thing to keep in mind. First, as of this post, SciFinder does not allow you to make a Tag "group" in which only certain people on your My Connections list can see only certain Tagged references. This means that once you are set up to share tags and comments with people, you can see *all* of each other's tags and comments. Second, you can only share with people at your home institution, i.e., people that are associated with the same SciFinder Scholar subscription. Perhaps SciFinder will expand this feature so anyone using the database could share tags and comments, but for now, this is not the case.

For more information about these and other new features, contact me or see SciFinder's How to Use New Features publication.


*** Have you seen my parallel blog on the University Libraries site? ***