FACILITATING EARLY INFORMATION SHARING IN SCIENTIFIC RESEARCH VIA SOCIAL NETWORKS

Research Proposal Presentation

Devipsita Bhattacharya

Agenda

Research Background My-Plant.org Google Analytics @ My-Plant.org OpenWetware.org Future Directions

Research Background

Research Lifecycle

Information sharing during the research lifecycle

Reluctance to share? Loss of ownership? Role of social networking

My-Plant.org and Social Network

Colleague RelationshipsClade – Based

Groups

Website Activity of Interest

Creation and/or Update of a forum posting Reply to a forum posting Addition of an image to the Clade gallery File upload to the Clade homepage Creation and/or Update of a tagged clade wall post Reply to a tagged clade wall post User Sign In User registering to a Clade User sending/accepting a colleague invitation Visitors viewing a given Clade or its sub-pages

Research Directions

Conduct an empirical study of social network by probing the network constructed using the user activity in a clade and colleague relationships. Two social networks : the explicit clade-centric and colleague-centric networks the implicit networks arising out of the website activities

Identify the various clusters and points of interest Determine the social capital, bonding and bridging factors for the

participating nodes (either clade or user) For the user-based networks, the centrality measures - Degree,

Betweenness and Eigen vector Pose major questions

Which members have most influence over others? Does the community break down into smaller groups (apart

from clade groups) and if so what are they? Which connections are most crucial to the functioning of a

group?

My-Plant.org Google Analytics Google Analytics reports:

Traffic Sources – Direct traffic, through referral sources such as search engines, blog posts

Visitors – Visitor information such as loyalty, location and language

Content – Pages viewed, top landing and exit pages Answer questions related to website traffic:

How many visitors are coming to My-Plant.org? Is the content effective? Do users exit the website

after visiting a page or do they continue browsing? How frequently are users visiting the website? How did the visitors hear about My-Plant.org? What is the website navigation path followed by

visitors?

User Browsing Patterns

Navigation Path

Using Google Analytics reports generated between July 28th and October 4th, 2010

Four major browsing patterns Homepage Traffic User-related Traffic Clade-related Traffic Help page Traffic

Inferences

OpenWetware.org

Information sharing website for biology and biological engineering

Developed in 2005 by students from Drew Andy’s bioengineering and Tom Ford’s bioinformatics group at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Website contentResources – Reference materials

Materials – Materials related to biological engineering research

Protocols – Execution steps, guidelines.

Labs and Groups – Listings of various research groups and institutions

Website structure and Data Sharing Wikipedia structure

Wiki pages for materials, protocols, resources, labs and groups Page creation and editing

Creation requires registration Edits to a page a tracked historically)

Viewing grants are provided to all website visitors Wiki page can be tagged by its editor Homepage hosting for institutes/labs to host their

homepages Helps implement social organization for scientists within a given

lab Opportunity for each lab member to log their contribution to the

lab website directly Additional lab materials can be linked to the laboratory website

The website content is licensed under the Creative Commons License, “Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported”

Research

Comparative study with my-plant.org Social network construction

Summary

Research Lifecycle Role of social networks in information

sharing between researchers My-plant.org and social structure Google Analytics for My-Plant Openwetware.org and comparative

study

Questions

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