Inside NIF: "Social Buzz" Vision

I recently came across an interesting blog post titled "Is Academia Eating Its Young", written by Bill Benzon. The main focus revolves around blogging in the academic community, particularly that there is no professional credit to be gained from blogging and many times can be viewed as detrimental to one's career.

Upon this realization, Bill suggests that "it's pointless to try and legitimate blogging in the current academic world." Granted, I can understand Bill's perspective and empathize with the nature of contemporary academia - at the Neuroscience Information Framework, we are investigating ways to harness the intellectual creativity that emerges from blog posts and other social media.

There are thousands of scientist bloggers, and a number of sites, such as F1000, The Third Reviewer and AkaWiki, which are dedicated entirely to discussion of recently published scientific articles. Often the personal and colloquial nature of blogs allows for pertinent praise and/or criticisms to come through in a way that is typically found in the closed doors of a journal club. Moreover, these posts are frequently very helpful to someone new in a particular field or someone trying to quickly extract the main points of an article.

At NIF, we are currently trying to aggregate the "social buzz" that surrounds popular neuroscience articles in order to harness the intellectual value contained therein. We envision that one day, while using NIF to find the latest data, literature or grants around a particular subject you will be able to quickly access and review blog posts, tweets and comments surrounding these objects from a single portal. In this way, albeit indirectly, professional credit could possibly be gleaned from the online activity of scientists. Moreover, communities of like minded scientists could be formed and active scientific discussions could take place.

We look forward to implementing some of this functionality with the release of NIF 4.0, but would like to gather thoughts, comments and ideas from the community. Would you find the "social buzz" of an article interesting or valuable? What would you like to do with this information? How can we deliver it most effectively? As always, we appreciate any feedback!