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!

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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.