ScienceSeeker on Google Currents, SciVerse and ImpactStory

ScienceSeeker is not just a website to find interesting science posts, it’s a huge open database, and we are constantly working on new and better ways to let you access and filter it, here are some of the cool things that you can do with our API:

Google Currents

[caption id="attachment_434" align="alignright" width="169"] Scan this QR link to get the Google Currents app.[/caption]

If you visited ScienceSeeker from your tablet or phone lately, or if you were playing around with the size of your browser window, you probably noticed that our new design is responsive, it adapts to the size of your screen, you can visit the same page from any device and it will change appropriately. If that’s not enough, our editor Raphael Ndem has something for you, the Google Currents Edition of ScienceSeeker, an app for your mobile device that will let you browse our feeds and read the amazing scientific content online on a magazine format.

SciVerse

ScienceSeeker has worked with OpenHelix to bring you a SciVerse app that lets you generate citations for the peer-reviewed article your are viewing or find other posts talking about it. To read more about how it works, you can visit OpenHelix’s blog post

ImpactStory

The ImpactStory team has integrated ScienceSeeker into their code to help you find all the blog posts citing a peer-reviewed article

ScienceSeeker launches massive upgrade powered by NASW grant

Today we launch the most significant update to ScienceSeeker ever. Instead of just following the 1200+ sources in our database, now you can easily search them to find reliable discussion of today's most vexing scientific issues.

[caption id="attachment_377" align="alignnone" width="500"] icon next to any post to bring up the post profile page. There, you'll see topics chosen by the post author. You can click on any of them to see other posts with the same topic — there are already several thousand topics in our database!

All of this was enabled by a $35,000 Idea Grant to ScienceSeeker by the National Association of Science Writers (NASW). It's among the largest Idea Grants the NASW has ever awarded, and the money will enable us to add even more functionality to the site in the coming months. Next on the agenda is additional integration with social media sites. We'd like to tabulate mentions on Twitter and Facebook and incorporate that into how articles are recommended. We also plan to allow you to convert any search into a feed, so you can track mentions of a particular article or topic without having to visit ScienceSeeker.

Here's a detailed rundown of all the new features on ScienceSeeker.org.

• Site redesigned from the bottom up. We have moved from a WordPress codebase to our own hand-coded system, which streamlines the site and makes everything much faster. The visual look of the site has also been enhanced, so users can easily see where the most important information is, and find details when they need them.


• New Search tool allows users to find scientific discussion on nearly any topic. In addition to the search bar found on every page, users can search source sites (blogs, news sites, and so on) and posts, and create feeds based on topics they are interested in.


• Streamlined login and user profiles. New users can register using their Twitter accounts, and the login interface now remembers your page to make your interaction with the site seamless. You can also upload profile photos and edit your user profile.


• Post profile page. Each post now has a profile page that lists post-level topics specified by the author (using categories or tags when they write the post). The topics are clickable, so you can easily find other posts with the same topics.


• Notifications. Authors can choose to be notified by email whenever one of their posts is chosen as an Editor's Pick. (If you'd like to activate this feature, just check the appropriate box on your Settings page).


• Post Profile badge. We've created a new badge that can be placed in any post, linking back to the ScienceSeeker profile of that post. The badge is automatically updated when ScienceSeeker identifies a citation on your post, or when it is chosen as an Editor's Pick.


• Pubmed and ArXiv support. Our citation generator now searches three databases to locate research articles. If you are an author and would like to add a citation of peer-reviewed research, just click the "Create Citation" link, enter a few words from the title of the article you'd like to cite, and our system will find any references to those words from the CrossRef, PubMed, and arXiv databases, covering nearly all peer-reviewed scientific publications. If your source isn't found, there is now an option to manually enter the citation to create a properly-formatted reference in the industry-standard COinS format, recognizable by ScienceSeeker, but also by other resources such as Mendeley, Zotero, and ResearchBlogging.org

You'll find dozens of other enhancements in this release; there are simply too many to enumerate. Even this blog has gotten a facelift! We encourage you to poke around the site, click on links, recommend your favorite posts, and make notes to share with others.

And don't forget to follow our four Twitter feeds (@SciSeeker, @SciSeekEds, @SciSeekNotes, and @SciSeekFeed), our Facebook page, and check out our Google+ page, which you can access via plus.scienceseeker.org.

If there are other features you'd like to see on ScienceSeeker, let us know -- either via social media, our contact page, or in the comments section below.

Hello world!

Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!

Introducing ScienceSeeker's newest editors: Raphael Ndem and Jordan Gaines

We're pleased to announce that two new editors have joined ScienceSeeker to help us share images and improve our presence on social media.

Jordan Gaines is our Social Media Editor. She is responsible for updating our Facebook page and managing our Twitter accounts (@SciSeeker, @SciSeekEds, @SciSeekNotes, and @SciSeekFeed). Look for our Facebook page in particular to get more active now that Jordan is in charge!

Jordan is a science writer, journal reviewer, and Ph.D. candidate at Penn State College of Medicine, where she studies sleep (in humans!). She blogs at Gaines, on Brains which explores current neuroscience research, translated into lay terms. Her writing has been featured on Scientific American, Psychology Today, Brain Blogger, LabSpaces, and Scientopia. In her "free time," Jordan enjoys reading, rowing, playing clarinet, and volunteering at her local Humane Society. Follow on Twitter @GainesOnBrains.

Raphael Ndem is our Photo Editor. He has already begun improving the quality and frequency of updates to the photos featured on the ScienceSeeker home page. He is also taking charge of our Google+ page, which you can access via plus.scienceseeker.org.

Raphael is a tech enthusiast who appreciates the wonders of computers & gadgets. Completing a BSc and MSc in Biomedical Science at a young age furthered his interests in the field of biology, and degree projects involved the use of bioinformatics tools for predicting the secondary structures, and trans-membrane regions of proteins, which allowed him to apply his passion for technology in biomedicine.

When not managing the audio or lighting for amatuer theatre productions, he regularly shares ideas and posts related to his interests on Google+.

ScienceSeeker seeks a photo / image editor

ScienceSeeker has great content editors who select excellent posts and news items to feature on our home page. Now we would like to give the same treatment to the images that appear on our home page.

Many science blog posts and news articles have great images that go along with them, and we want to make sure more of them are featured on ScienceSeeker. The new volunteer editor's job would be to identify 5 or 6 images suitable for our home page each week. It only takes a minute to post a photo to ScienceSeeker, so this involves a minimal effort, but it will have a maximal impact.

Qualifications:

• An active online presence on a blog and / or social networking sites like Twitter, Google+, and FaceBook


• We don’t require that our editors have PhDs, but the candidates we select will have demonstrated expertise via their blogging or other publication record.


• An interest and engagement with visual images in science.


• Enthusiasm for science

If you’re interested in the job, please email dsmunger@gmail.com with a paragraph or two about why you would like to be an editor, and provide a link to 2 or 3 of your own online posts about science that you feel show your interest in visual depictions of science and scientific informaiton. Link your social media feeds and other relevant sites, if any. You may attach or link to a curriculum vitae.

Editors are permanently listed on ScienceSeeker.org, so this position will make a great addition to your CV. We will select the new editor by October 15, 2012.

Launching version 2.2: Twitter Integration

A couple of days ago we launched ScienceSeeker version 2.2, initially this update was meant to be only for backend enhancements and fixes, but we couldn’t resist and ended up including some interesting new features. For a while we have been talking about the things we would like to add to the site, and integration with social networks has always been one of our topics of conversation, now we have taken the first step.

Twitter Integration

If you have an account, you might have already seen the “Sync Twitter” button, it will take you to the synchronization page where you can sync your account to Twitter with just a few clicks, this will allow you to tweet your notes directly from our site, and be added to the ScienceSeeker member list to have your tweets show up in the sidebar



You will have the option to select if your notes will be tweeted or not, the post's URL and blog's Twitter handle (when available) will be added to the tweet. There's a new field in “Your blogs” for you to tell us your site’s Twitter handle, you can use your personal Twitter account if you don’t have one specific to your site.

New Twitter feed: @SciSeekNotes

As a part of our Twitter integration, there's a new way to find out what everyone's been saying about posts on ScienceSeeker, the @SciSeekNotes Twitter account. This account tweets whenever anyone makes a note on a ScienceSeeker post, so you can find out which posts are generating conversation here.

@SciSeekNotes is one of four ScienceSeeker twitter feeds. The others are

• @SciSeekEds - Tweets every Editors' Pick from ScienceSeeker


• @SciSeekFeed - A tweet for every post on ScienceSeeker (prepare to drink from the firehose!)


• @SciSeeker - The official ScienceSeeker feed, for news and announcements.

Improved submission process

We simplified the submission process, new sites can now be added without an account (you still need to log in to claim and edit your sites), just give us a link — ideally the home page — and the server will automatically fill the form with the information it can find, you can edit anything in the next page before clicking the submission button.



There’s also a new way to submit new sites, you can get the new ScienceSeeker bookmarklet to add the sites by just clicking a button.

Launching the ScienceSeeker search API

Today, we are launching version 2.1 of ScienceSeeker. We have enhanced the site in many ways, but the big new feature is our new search API. You can use this tool to find anything in our database of over 1,000 blogs and 120,000 posts. We added a variety of options to let you sort by things like title, summary, number of recommendations, or even posts talking about a specific peer-reviewed article.

This release provides the foundation and most basic feature: search functionality. It can be used by developers interested in creating something using ScienceSeeker; we are planning to release a user interface for it shortly.

Here are some of examples of the things you can do with this new tool:

• Find a source with a specific name in our index (example: 365 days of astronomy podcast): http://scienceseeker.org/blogs/?type=blog&filter0=title&value0=365%20Days%20of%20Astronomy

• Find posts mentioning a specific word or phrase in their summary (example: proton): http://scienceseeker.org/displayfeed/?type=post&filter0=summary&value0=proton

• Find posts talking about peer-reviewed articles by a specific author (example: Clark K.): http://scienceseeker.org/displayfeed/?type=post&filter0=citation&modifier0=author&value0=Clark,%20K

• Find posts citing a specific journal (example: PLoS): http://scienceseeker.org/displayfeed/?type=post&filter0=citation&modifier0=journal-title&value0=PLoS

For more information about the search and filters, and how you can use them in your application or website, visit our API documentation page or contact us for questions and requests.

Searching ScienceSeeker blogs

ScienceSeeker is developing an API to allow other services to access
our database, and we'd like your input as we proceed. The details of
an API can be complex, but the concept is simple: It's a way that
websites, applications, and other services can use our data to build
additional functionality. For example, a journal might want to show
its readers how frequently their articles are being cited by blogs,
and when our API is complete, they could use ScienceSeeker's database
to find out.

The API consists of a single web request to the search application. All
search parameters will be contained within that request, as parameters
in the URL. The search application will return XML-encoded data which
will contain relevant search results.

You can search for blogs, for posts, or for topics. For example, you
might want to search for all blogs which contain "Skeptic" in the title,
or all posts with a topic of "Deep Sea Dive". (You can't search blogs
and posts at the same time; you have to select one type of object to
search.)

The supported list of search queries, or "filters," is still in
development. We expect to support searching by title, topic, summary
text, citation, URL, posts to a blog with a specific title or topic, and
some other filters.

We are also in the process of developing a second means of accessing the
API, which would support more complicated queries with AND, OR, and NOT
syntax. For now, multiple filters in a query will be considered to be
"AND"ed together.

The documentation for the API is not solidified yet, but is available
for reading. Feedback is welcome!

Introducing our new slate of editors

Here's the slate of editors that will be offering their expert recommendations, selecting the best posts in their favorite fields of study. Each editor will choose 4 to 5 posts a week from among the hundreds we collect each day, making it easier for you to find the best posts on ScienceSeeker. You can also follow their picks on Twitter.

Sarah Chow
When not busy in the lab measuring the thermodynamic properties of the reaction between a molecule called cAMP and the Pacemaker protein, Sarah Chow spends a lot of her nights tweeting, blogging and—her newest endeavor—podcasting for Experimental Podcast and video blogging on her website. On Saturday nights, you can find Sarah putting girl guides and boy scouts to sleep as the leader in charge of the sleep over program at Science World British Columbia.

To keep her sanity, she runs for miles in the beautiful trails of Vancouver. She will be making her picks in anthropology, biology, chemistry, ecology / conservation, health, medicine, and philosophy.

Matthew Francis
Matthew Francis is a science writer and speaker specializing in physics, astronomy, and related fields. He is a former college professor, ex-planetarium director, occasional musician, and frequent wearer of jaunty hats. He blogs about science and science communication at Galileo's Pendulum; he is also the physics and math editor at Double X Science and freelance physics/astronomy writer for Ars Technica. His writing has appeared at Wired Science, the Scientific American Guest Blog, Culture of Science, and the 365 Days of Astronomy podcast. Matthew will be making his picks in astronomy and physics.

Cristy Gelling
Cristy Gelling is a postdoctoral cell biologist at the University of Pittsburgh working on the human genetic disease alpha-1 antitrypsin deficiency using her favorite domesticated organism, bakers' yeast. She writes articles for Bitesize Bio that she hopes are useful for other lab rats, she blogs about science and her last days in the lab at The Blobologist, and when she's feeling motivated she harasses her friends in Pittsburgh into writing about science at Steel City Science. She's either from Australia or from New Zealand, depending on who's asking the question. She will be selecting posts on biology, chemistry, and academic life.

Jason Goldman
Jason Goldman is a doctoral student and avid blogger and editor. He blogs at Thoughtful Animal, has served as Psychology and Neuroscience Editor for Research Blogging, and was editor of The Open Laboratory 2010. He will be selecting posts on psychology and neuroscience.

Mark Hahnel
Mark Hahnel is a stem cell biologist and geneticist who is the force behind Science 3.0. He's currently helping with the development of ScienceSeeker, and he is Project Manager for Figshare. He'll be making his editor's picks in biology and genetics.

Peter Krautzberger
Peter Krautzberger studied mathematics in Munich and Berlin and recently spent two years at the University of Michigan as a DFG postdoctoral fellow. He founded mathblogging.org, the math copy-cat of scienceblogging.org, as well boolesrings.org, a network of academic homepages using wordpress. He will be making his picks in the field of mathematics.

Andrew Watt
Andrew Watt is a PhD candidate at the University of Melbourne where he is investigating diagnostic measures for Alzheimer's disease, and a few other neurodegenerative conditions. He has a background in genetics and psychology and has even dabbled in documentary film-making, although that was quite some time ago now.

For many years Andrew has had a, some would say unhealthy, fascination with the human brain. And in an effort to share his fascination he created A Hippo on Campus, a blog where he investigates contemporary research from the fields of neuropsychology, neurobiology, and beyond. He'll be making his editor's picks in medicine, neuroscience, and psychology.

Allie Wilkinson
Allie Wilkinson is a freelance science writer and multimedia specialist with a background in environmental studies and conservation biology. She also founded This Is What A Scientist Looks Like, an ongoing community photo project to challenge the stereotypical perception of a scientist. You can follow her on her blog Oh, For the Love of Science! and Twitter. Allie will be making her editor's picks on biology, conservation, ecology, environmental sciences, evolution, marine biology, and geosciences.

Introducing... New features and new editors!

Today ScienceSeeker is launching a fleet of new features that we think will make ScienceSeeker your go-to site for everything about science online.

To see all the new features, you may need to clear the cache on your browser. Here's what you'll see:

Expert Recommendations. Most importantly, we have seven new editors who will be helping you find the very best items from the hundreds collected by ScienceSeeker every day. You can check out the most recent Editor's Picks in the right sidebar of the main page, and by checking the "Editor's Picks" box in our new Filters section, you can see only the posts that have been recommended by our editors.

Flexible Filters. Speaking of filters, the new Filters feature in the left sidebar will help you narrow down the massive list of items in our feed. If you only want to see posts about Physics, or citing peer-reviewed sources, here's the place to look. More importantly, you can combine the filters, and generate your own RSS feed. Maybe you just want to see Editor's Picks on Biology, Astrophysics, and Medicine. Now you can, and you can view them on-screen or have them delivered to your preferred RSS reader.

Make your Own Suggestions. Our editors will be selecting fantastic items from the ScienceSeeker feed, but you don't have to listen to just them. You can add your own voice to the mix with your own recommendations. Registered users can login, then click on the star next to any entry to recommend it. You can leave a note explaining why you like the post, and soon we'll have a way for your notes to be automatically posted to social media sites.

Better Photos. ScienceSeeker now not only collects entries and articles from scientists and science writers, it also displays photos picked by our editors. A new slide show on our main page shows the week's best images in science.

Cite your Sources. If you're a writer or a blogger, you can now use our "Generate Citation" tool to create references to peer-reviewed journal articles. The code created by our site can be pasted into your blog and is recognized by ScienceSeeker, ResearchBlogging, Zotero, EndNote, and many other services. If you already have an account at ResearchBlogging, you can create a citation here and have it recognized by both ResearchBlogging and ScienceSeeker (And as before, we'll continue to recognize citations created in ResearchBlogging).

We'd love to hear what you think of these new features—as well as your ideas for new ones. Let us know in the comments section below!

ScienceSeeker Seeks Science-Savvy Editors

ScienceSeeker is now one year old, and we've made some great strides in the past year. But in the next year, we're planning even more. We're about to get a whole lot more interactive, and we need people manage all that interactivity.

With over 900 blogs and hundreds of posts indexed each day, ScienceSeeker can sometimes be rather overwhelming. To help visitors sort through all that information, we'll be relying both on our readers and specialized volunteer editors. We expect this new functionality to be ready within a few weeks, so to prepare for it, we need to sign up editors now.

The primary job of the new editors will be to share their favorite ScienceSeeker posts. They'll select five posts a week from blogs covering their areas of expertise, and readers will be able to view those posts on our site or subscribe to a feed of just the recommended posts. We expect this to take just a few minutes each day.

Qualifications:

• An active online presence on a blog and / or social networking sites like Twitter, Google+, and FaceBook


• We don’t require that our editors have PhDs, but the candidates we select will have demonstrated expertise via their blogging or other publication record.


• Enthusiasm for science

If you’re interested in the job, please email dsmunger@gmail.com with a paragraph or two about why you would like to be an editor, and provide a link to 2 or 3 of your own online posts about science that you feel are especially good. Link your social media feeds and other relevant sites, if any. You may attach or link to a curriculum vitae.

Editors will be permanently listed on ScienceSeeker.org, so this position will make a great addition to your CV. We will select the new editors by February 1, 2012.

18 Jan 2012: Updated to indicate the editorships are volunteer positions.