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Research 2.0: useful Web applications for researchers.

Article Excerpt
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WEB 2.0 has myriad resources to discover, search, store, and collaborate on the Internet. But how many of these new-technology applications are truly useful? While social networking technologies may be personally rewarding, can you really use any of the social bookmarks, wikis, mashups, and other Web tools to conduct and organize research? Furthermore, do any of the new applications contribute to better research results? Luckily, there are many Web 2.0 tools currently available that are useful in many ways. The following are some that I've found useful, especially for collaboration and time management.

SOCIAL BOOKMARKS IN GENERAL

Many of the new, upcoming bookmarks appear to offer more than the typical bookmark saving and sharing, as found with del.icio.us (http://del.icio.us). One new competitor to del.icio.us is Mister Wong (www.mister-wong .com). This social bookmarking site originates in Germany.

Mister Wong has specialized bookmarking portals in German, Russian, Chinese, French, and Spanish. You can import/export your current bookmarks as well as other favorites and make them public or private. What makes Mister Wong even more social is the ability to join various public and private groups and add other members as buddies. You can even create your own group according to your interests and choose to make it public or private. This allows you to share your bookmarks within your group only. It is also possible to access your bookmarks through your mobile phone.

Other bookmarking services go beyond just saving bookmarks. Some offer ways to research and organize bookmarks. Some target specific categories of researchers, thus resulting in the sharing of relevant research and information.

SOCIAL BOOKMARKS FOR RESEARCH

A new service that helps to not only research but also read online is ButterFly (http://butterflyproject.nl). This free service goes beyond collecting and sharing Web pages. The site's ButterFly-Reader allows you to add hyperlinks and notes, highlight words, look up information, and translate selections, all within the same Web page and with one mouse-click. An online demonstration of ButterFly-Reader contains more details. There's no software to install with ButterFly, just a bookmarklet that's added to your browser. ButterFly currently works in Firefox, Internet Explorer, and Safari. You can make your bookmarks public or private, and change your settings anytime.

Another research-focused bookmark service is SNiPiTRON (http://snipitron.com), which caters to professionals and academics working on projects. It's free, and the stored information can be public or private. You can save Web pages, file attachments, screenshots, and audio/video content. You can also collaborate on projects with private groups. SNiPiTRON browser buttons are available for Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, and Opera.

SOCIAL BOOKMARKS FOR TARGETED RESEARCHERS

CiteULike (www.citeulike.org) is a free service for academics to share, store, and organize the academic papers they are reading. When you see a paper on the Web that interests you, just click a button and add it to your personal library. The citations are automatically extracted, so there's no need to type them yourself. No installation is required; it works within a Web browser. You can export your library to BibTeX or EndNote. The site is useful for research since there are about 11,400 journals that can be browsed from the site. It is also possible to browse articles posted by groups as well as join those groups. Some limitations to this site include the fact that the database consists mostly of biological and medical papers, although there are nonscientific categories too. Also, if you save an article from a nonsupported site, the citations are not automatically extracted.

Dissect Medicine (www.dissectmedicine.com) is a collaborative medical news site, produced...