Good news on the front of the development of the scientific feeds retriever: @neuromusic transferred the python code to his github account! There is now a repository named sciple-rss.py that you can play with. Now that people with a “serious” background in computational/software development will be able to put their hands on it, I feel a re-grown hope for this project! I am a weekend-self-tautght-coder and I feel I can’t push this project any further (.. or at least not on a human time-scale..). @neuromusic has played with the Mendeley API and I am sure that he is up to something really interesting!
I can’t stress enough the point that we (scientists) need an intelligent tool for retrieving scientific feeds. All we need is a tool that let emerge useful information among an exponentially-growing mass of publications.
Exponential growth of dendritic spines: number of papers on pubmed
Pubmed search has implemented a widget showing the amount of papers published per year. I haven’t tested it yet, but I am pretty sure that whatever keywords we look for: the trend is going to be exponential.
At least this is what I found while I was working on my memory consolidation text-mining project. Every keyword follows an exponential pattern. De-trending the curve brings up something interesting: even though the absolute number of papers is growing, you can detect some fluctuations in the enthusiasm for specific sub-topics (e.g. reconsolidation).
but the trend never stops!
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So here is a task for you: Can you spot a topic whose trend is SUBSTANTIALLY different from an exponential trend (see the picture above)?
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Number of papers published on the topic cerebellum. Enough of cerebellum?
So far, I have found the keyword CEREBELLUM that seems to have reached a plateau. but most of the topics show this scary exponential trend. We are literally drowning in this vast ocean of scientific publications!
There is another place where we are ‘physically’ submerged by scientific information: the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience.
Thousands and thousands of presentations spread across 4-5 days. There is no way we can attend/read all of them and even if we use the Itinerary Planning we constantly have this paranoid feeling that we are missing something important.
How many times happened to you to bump into a friend/colleague telling you about that poster you missed at the end of the poster hall?
Twitter may be of help here (see our previous project as Neurobloggers), but still this is not what we need to catch up with the science going on during this 40K-attendees-conference! We miss so much during the meeting. That is annoying! and that’s why we are taking care of this!!
Stay tuned for more information about our new exciting project for SfN12 !!!!!
