Net Assets : The Social Web For Radiology

Net Assets #5 The Social Web for Radiology, Part I: Social Bookmarking to Social Citation by Stuart R. Pomerantz and Garry Choy Revolutionary advances in website design, dubbed Web 2.0, have created a strikingly dynamic online experience unthinkable only a few years ago. Offering much more than just visual pizzazz, this new environment has brought us websites that have the functionality of traditionally installed applications and also extraordinary new interactive tools, such as Blogs, Wikis, and RSS newsfeeds. These new elements shift the focus back to the user. We now have greater control of the daily flow of online content in our lives as well as the means to add our own contributions! The latest Web 2.0 phenomenon is the emergence of various Social Network websites. These sites are now achieving mainstream popularity as anyone who has received multiple email requests to be “friended” can attest. Services like Delicious, Furl, and Digg, make it simple for anyone to keep track of the many stimulating online articles and websites they stumble across on a given day. These links can be shared with close friends and colleagues as well as with wider communities sharing similar interests across the globe. In turn, users of these Social Web services benefit from “best of the web” recommendations filtered to their own unique mix of pursuits. There are also Social web services oriented to the business community, such as LinkedIn and Plaxo, which enhance the quality of professional networks by simplifying the ease of discovering contacts, posing questions, and sharing expertise. Social Sites like MySpace and, now the amazingly popular, Facebook, are even more ambitious, offering their users a forum to share all aspects of their personality, interests, and whims online, if they so desire. While acknowledging the novelty of connecting with long out-of-touch schoolmates and the irresistible urge to send a hilarious video clip to all your friends, it is fair to ask ”Can any of this make me a better or more productive radiologist?” Indeed, a burgeoning Social Web for Radiology already does exist, offering increasing utility to its early adopters and holding even greater promise for the future. To inform the wider community of radiologists of the many productivity, educational and other potential career benefits of Social Web applications, we will address this exciting topic over several Net Assets columns. In this current column, we will begin the exploration with an overview of online Social Bookmarking services. These sites can facilitate the acquisition and organization of your personal collection of scientific journal articles links and other useful online medical references and make them available to you anywhere on the web. The best of these sites incorporate social networking features and are specifically designed for cataloging the medical and scientific literature i.e. Social Citation. An essential feature of all such sites is the organizational scheme known as tagging. We will explore this enhanced method of categorizing one’s content collections for fast retrieval and, importantly, enhanced

discoverability which facilitates sharing with the global radiology community. In subsequent columns, we will move beyond social bookmarking services to online content managers such as MedicalPlexus.net that enable the storage and sharing of actual educational and research content including Powerpoint presentations, Adobe Acrobat documents (pdfs), lecture videos, and other materials. We will also explore sites such as RadRounds that, in a fashion similar to the LinkedIn and Facebook services, offer the individual radiologist a venue for a rich online presence. By enabling us to enmesh ourselves with the global radiology community, we can maintain and enrich our contacts with colleagues around the world and even spawn new dynamic relationships based on common interests and experience. In previous Net Assets columns, we highlighted numerous online sources of valuable reference material for the practicing radiologist, such as MRIsafety.com. We also explored online tools for the never-ending discovery of new material such as the radiology-centric Search Engines Yottalook and Goldminer and the various RSS (really –simple-syndication) services which can be set up to automatically cull the latest offerings from radiology journals and other medical press[ref NA#1, NA#2]. All of these enable up-to-date information to insinuate itself throughout our daily workflow. But they do not provide means to organize, store, and share the most interesting and useful items we encounter. Before a discussion how the latest Social Bookmarking services tackle this problem, it will be beneficial to briefly mention a few older online solutions that are still available and potentially useful. A. My NCBI Collections Probably one of the simplest ways to store your links to useful journal articles is setting up a free My NCBI account on the familiar PubMed (www.pubmed.gov) website. After you enter a query into Pubmed, you are given the option to save your search results to a MyNCBI Collection (Fig 1a). You can “Create a New Collection” or “Append” selected search results to a previously saved collection. (Fig 1b.) Your stored collections can then be accessed from any internet connection by simply logging into the My NCBI page on the Pubmed website (Fig 1c). You are given the option to email your collection to yourself or friends or send it directly to a printer or text file. You can even set up your My NCBI account to automatically email you updates to your specified searches. Since the My NCBI service pre-dates the Web 2.0 social revolution, there currently is no way to directly share your collections with others.

B.

Local Bookmarking and Search Engine Toolbars

PubMed is invaluable for formal queries of the scholarly literature, yet many interesting articles are discovered when browsing the web in a more haphazard fashion. You might have started your search by typing a topic into Google or PubMed but once you arrive at the abstract on a specific journal’s website, you may find more highly

relevant articles listed in the section below the abstract entitled “This article has been cited by other articles:.” Of course, each article linked in this fashion may in turn have additional relevant citing articles from numerous different journals, also discoverable with just a single additional click. As you jump from one great article to another, the need for a method of capturing and organizing these links for later review becomes even more pressing. One possibility is to save interesting links locally using the browser’s Bookmarks feature (also known as “Favorites” in Internet Explorer). Though creating a browser bookmark is easy, finding it again in the future is a different story. Over time, the usefulness of local bookmark lists fade as they invariably become too large, disorganized, and outdated. Also we may find ourselves using multiple different web-browsers throughout the course of a single day as we move between PACS stations in the reading room, PCs in work and home offices, and even laptops and internet-capable mobile phones. Though add-on toolbars from sites like Google or Yahoo offer the ability to access a single online set of bookmarks from any browser (Fig. 2), the problem of organizing an ever-enlarging set of links persists. C.

Social Bookmarking and Tagging to the Rescue

What do Social Bookmarking sites offer over previous attempts to help users manage their bookmarks. One of the most popular and best examples of the new breed of bookmarking tools is Delicious (http://www.delicious.com), whose website invites you to “Search the biggest collection of bookmarks in the universe.” Delicious and other social bookmarking sites attempt to provide the universal accessibility of personal link collections on the Yahoo and Google toolbars while also leveraging the power of social networks by combining the bookmarks of all its users into a gigantic searchable collection. You may be muttering to yourself “I have a hard enough time finding my own previously saved links, how could anyone else find a specific item! The answer lies with tagging. Tagging is a superior organization method which is featured on an increasing number of Web 2.0 sites for cataloging bookmarks, email, and even faces within uploaded photos. In traditional organization schemes, there is a hierarchical arrangement of categories or folder trees for grouping such as Disease Type, Imaging Modality, or Age Group. With tagging, the traditional folder hierarchy is flattened and the organizational focus shifted to the individual item. Thus, instead of placing individual bookmarks or other items in a particular folder, each and every item gets labeled with as many usergenerated key words or “tags” as desired. The dreaded chore of setting up and maintaining a rigid hierarchy of bookmark folders is unnecessary. There is no organizational dilemma when a particular bookmark, for example, an article on MRI of Juvenile Pilocytic Astrocytoma, spans multiple folder categories as in the scheme above. You can apply as many tags as you like without concern for whether they overlap because they do not imply mutually exclusive categories.

When it comes time to search your collection, it is easy to find specific items, because each tag acts as a filter of the entire bookmark collection. In a hierarchical folder system, you would have to visually inspect the contents of each subfolder to make sure you retrieved all desired items. With tagging, you simply click on an individual label from your bank of tags (or “tag cloud”) to see all items with that label. (Fig) Tags can be formal disease categories but one can freely add personalized labels such as for individual research project or even temporary tags such as “ReadThisFirst” or “ForMay15thLecture” without the need to create new folders or make duplicates of any bookmark. The database and search engine technology that powers Web 2.0 services enables you to search among even large numbers of tags and bookmark items with ease. When you have retrieved a particular bookmark from your collection, you may note the other tags you have applied to it. For example, you may have retrieved an article from your collection entitled “Non-invasive Imaging of Intracranial Aneurysms” by clicking on the CTA tag. At this point you note it also has been tagged with MRA and Aneurysms tags which can lead you to the additional items in your collection on those topics. Tags also facilitate the Networking aspect of Social Bookmarking. If others members of the social network have also used the same tag, e.g. “RF Ablation” or “Berry Aneurysms,” you have the option of seeing items from their collection that share that label. If someone else has used the same tag as you in their collection, they may share many other interests as well. Viewing the other custom tags in their collection may draw you to additional material you might never have otherwise come across. As with all Social Network services, privacy settings are adjustable. You can designate individual items or tags to only be visible from your own account. Others tag you may share exclusively with your research group, family, or co-workers or make generally available to the entire social network. There are an increasingly large number of different Social Bookmarking networks with sometimes bizarre-sounding names like Delicious, Reddit, Furl, Spurl, Technorati, and StumbleUpon. Links to their sites often appear as colorful icons at the bottom of articles and other web content, even within radiology journals (Fig). For the most part, you can only share with others in a particular community, though they are almost all free to join, making it easy to switch or audition a service. These sites provide a one-click bookmark capturing option through an additional button (commonly termed bookmarklet) which can be added to your browsers toolbar. C.

From Social Bookmarking to Social Citation

There is no reason why any of the general interest Social Bookmarking sites can not be utilized for managing one’s collection of radiology links. However, there are now several sites that seek to meet the special Social Bookmarking needs of the scientific and medical communities. The sites Connotea, 2Colab and CiteUlike enable you to tag, save,

manage and share your favorite links, as with the general interest services, but make it much easier to bookmark academic journal articles by automatically capturing the scientific metadata. This metadata includes not just the title and link to the journal’s online archive but additional bibliographic information including author names, volume, issue and page numbers, and publication date. This convenience not only saves typing and copy and paste steps, but also enhances sharing since all entries are properly identified and therefore more reliably discoverable. Connotea, 2Colab and CiteUlike are quite similar in functionality but are sponsored by different publishers (Nature Publishing Group, Elsevier, and Springer, respectively) and support different online full-text distributors. Consequently, each of the services does better at extracting data from some journal’s web pages than others. Connotea supports Highwire Press which provides the online presence of Radiology and Radiographics from the RSNA as well as American Journal of Roentgenology, American Journal of Neuroradiolgy and British Journal of Radiology. If you are more likely to want to access journals from the other publishers, than that should guide your choice between the different academic social bookmarking sites. All three however can easily capture the data from the abstract listing on the Pubmed website. It is also possible to manually enter any piece of data into the appropriate fields. Of nonte, all three services allow you to add links to any type of webpage not just journal articles. In addition to tags, there are fields for separate free-text descriptions and comments. The comments are a way to editorialize on an article in a public way and share thoughts with others. Reading other user’s comments on an article can be illuminating, helping you to better understand the article including its strengths and faults. The depth of the social experience of course depends on the number of users actively using the service. For the field of radiology, that aspect is sparse at this time, but the benefits of capturing metadata and connecting with colleagues worldwide ensures that such services will continue to grow and prosper. Though these sites do not replace the functionality of fully-featured reference managers such as EndNote and Refworks, the convenience of one-click entry, universal access and social web features make them complementary to those other services. To aid those who wish to use both, there are instructions for import and export functions for many bibliographic formats including RIS, BIBTex, and Endnote. In the next Net Assets column we will continue to expand upon our discussion of Social Network web applications and how they can increase your productivity in radiology. As always, feel free to e-mail requests for future topics you would like to see discussed in Net Assets ([email protected]) or to share your own discoveries of useful Web sites.

FIGURES

Figure 1a. One of the simplest ways to store your links to useful journal articles is setting up a free My NCBI account on the familiar PubMed (www.pubmed.gov) website. After you enter a query into Pubmed, you are given the option to save your search results to a MyNCBI Collection.

Figure 1b. You can “Create a New Collection” or “Append” selected search results to a previously saved collection.

Figure 1c. Your own stored personal collections can then be accessed from any internet connection by simply logging into the My NCBI page on the PubMed website.

Figure 2. Add-on toolbars from sites like Google or Yahoo offer the ability to access a single online set of bookmarks from any browser.

Delicious – Social Bookmarking - Tags

Figure 3a. Social Bookmark site Delicious offers the capability to organize your collection of links and articles with tags for easy retrieval and sharing of links. Figure 3b, 3c. Social Network sites such as Delicious can display both a single users custom descriptions or all the entire network’s into personal and popular “tag clouds,” respectively. 3b

3c

4a

4b

Fig 4. Links to Social Bookmarks services are becoming more commonly throughout the web, typically below an article or blog post (4a). Some of the biggest and most wellknown, such as Delicious (sometimes spelled Del.ici.ous), Furl, Reddit, can even be found in radiology journals (4b).

Figure 5a - Connotea

5b. Citeulike Fig 5a, 5b Social bookmarking has also evolved to meet the needs of the academic scientific and medical communities via sites like My Connotea, 2Collab and CiteUlike. All of these sites have similar features. For example, in My Connotea one can tag and save your favorite links through one universally accessible web interface but make it easier to do so for scientific literature by automatically capturing the scientific “metadata” from a submitted article (a). One can then access your personal collection of scientific papers and links via your personal folder or personal tag cloud (b)