Attention developers of search tools and social networking sites for the sciences. It is imperative and in your best interests to create screencasts and feature them smack dab in the middle of your pages. My editor sends me many notes about potentially fascinating tools such as BioMedExperts. But unless there is a screencast that really screams at me, “This really cool!” or “Medical librarian—this is something you will want to show your colleagues. This is something you will use,” I am likely to simply sigh and say to myself, “Missed opportunity.”

BioMedExperts is a handsome site and it is a welcome development in many ways. To wit, it is an attempt to harness social networking in the interest of the life sciences. Social networking and online communities can strike some in the sciences and many librarians as venues for time-wasting and vehicles for the vacuous. Therefore, kudos for BioMedExperts for creating a platform that has the potential for generating genuinely productive scholarly interactions.

And it is of interest to medical and scitech librarians and information sciences in that it is literature based and closely tied to our beloved PubMed.

It states:

Bringing the right researchers together and allowing them to grow their professional network is the ultimate goal of biomedexperts (BME) – the first literature-based social networking platform for the life-science research community.

BioMedExperts is a new online community that connects biomedical researchers to each other through the display and analysis of the networks of co-authors with whom each investigator works to publish scientific papers.”

But here is where there is marketing to be done and where a screencast would help. This is promising wording, “Welcome to BioMedExperts

BioMedExperts provides you with an exciting new view to the world of biomedical research. The literature network represents more than 1.4 million scientist profiles. Included are all people who have authored at least three articles in the last 10 years that appear in the PubMed database.”

I am interested in amyotrophic lateral sclerosis so tried, “Find Experts.” But I ended up with a definition of the illness, not a list of experts. This is where the tool GoPubMed.org shows how that feature is done right. It is very easy in GoPubMed.org to determine within seconds who the top authors are for a given condition. BioMedExperts has great potential in this area, but I needed quick results or, failing that, my beloved screencast to show me what I was doing wrong. It could also use some testimonials by noted scientists who are actually using it. After all, there are myriad professional organizations and conferences via which researchers communicate. What added value does BioMedExperts add? Again, bring in the marketing guys.

For instance, both GoPubMed.org and Patents.com enable users to use their good offices to somehow contact the scholar or inventor whose work you are interested in. But you have to burrow pretty deep into BiomedExperts to find out what may be of use to you. And, please, Web site designers—make it easy for me to get back to the home page—especially if you are brand new site and want to attract a solid cohort of users. I kept getting pop-ups which, while useful, were not as helpful as getting back to the home page would have been.

I kept longing for the genuine pleasure of breezing through Patents.com—now they could teach BiomedExperts a thing or two about fluidity of design. Here is what Patents.com says:

Patents.com is not just a patent search engine, it is also an intellectual property community platform and tool for connecting you with others in the patent ecosystem.”

And it is easy to use and to navigate. BioMedExperts could do the same thing for basic and clinical research and seems to want to and more power to it. It just needs oomph and “Show Me” wizardry.

As someone who works in a medical library, I welcome tools that have that could show me quickly whom I might be able communicate with to determine how to find a paper. Scholars can be remarkably generous in that respect and BioMedExperts is well-intentioned. I just need to be able to look at it and see video clips of real live scientists singing its praises and maybe a listing of actual projects that have resulted from connections made on it. And I need a screencast showing me what I would get if I clicked here and there and here.

In real estate, it is location, location, location. In search and social networking platforms it seems to be, “Screencasts, screencasts, screencasts.”

By Hope Leman

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 9th, 2008 at 5:00 pm and is filed under Guest Authors, Reviews, Verticals. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.