03 MAY 2011 by ideonexus
Writing as Quilting
This book is crammed with original ideas—very few of them my own. Science writers become accustomed to the feeling that they are intellectual plagiarists, raiding the minds of those who are too busy to tell the world about their discoveries. There are scores of people who could have written each chapter of my book better than I. My consolation is that few could have written all the chapters. My role has been to connect the patches of others' research together into a quilt.Taking ideas and patching them into the quilt of a book.
17 JAN 2011 by ideonexus
Notes from the "Fun With Citations" Session
No direct quote for this meme.These are general notes summarizing comments from audience members and speakers for this session:
- Taking pdfs extracting text and semantically marking them up, hyperlinking reference lists to their source articles.
- Mendeley http://www.mendeley.com/
- http://www.mendeley.com/research-papers/computer-and-information-science/
- Citations have no meaning the way we use them now.
- Most papers aren’t cited, long tail graph (zitiny ziphian curve graph?)
- Citation Graph, collaborative filtering,.
- Citations need context. How will that happen? Need to know why something was cited (ie. Disagreement).
- We don’t disagree with papers, we disagree with claims made in papers. Why can’t a citation point at a place in the article?
- Question: Is reference extraction beyond the scope of any non-commercial company? Mendeley is a company.
- Answer: There’s no single source of open bibliographic data.
- Sage, SocialSciences,Crossref, webofscience, google scholar, etc – how useful are these sites. They provide metrics and recommendations, but not much more than going directly to the journal.
- Social Networking in article recommendations, connect content to people, conversations around papers, systems don’t encourage conversations, people don’t want to participate.
- Criticism of Mendeley: algorithms shoudl be open, academics should be able to define their own algorithms
- Mendeley's plan is to extract reference data and make it publicly available and machine readable.
- Criticism: academics need an open bibliographic data set.
- Need to explain type of citation: positive vs. negative citations, valence terms, sentiment analysis/machine vs. human curated
- Ontologies don't capture all reasons someone is citing something (ie. "Cited because I work for this journal." "Cited because Darwin will make you think I'm smart." "Cited because teacher required five citations.")
- References are separated into their own section, removing them from the text. Unlike links, which are immediate.
- Peer Review: example of a reviewer rejecting a paper because it didn't cite his own paper.
- People need to make use of the REL attribute in HREF tags.
- Citations can be used in a tribal sens, citing people in our camp and excluding others.
- Description of citations as "frozen footprints in the snow"
- Why do we need 1,000 citation styles?
- Librarian: Questions about citations styles from students are constant and frustrating.
- Orchid: cross-company effort to standardize citations.
- Let people write citations however they want, but add an identifying number.
- Mendeley is developing an open-source citation style editor.