OpenSocial Gadget Contest

Adding new features to Profiles and/or VIVO

Conference Recommendation

Proposal Status: 

1. Harvest "Research Raven" into structured form (this may require getting permission):

http://www.researchraven.com/about-us.aspx

Microsoft Academic Research has this data but it seems limited to computer science.  PubsHub also mantains such data but it's proprietary.

 

2. Using keywords from a user's profile, match people to upcoming calls for papers at conferences. Sort into two categories: conferences to attend and conferences to submit to.

 

3. List the top ranked upcoming conferences for a given person.

Comments

Paul - interesting idea. Given that most profiles have a very large number of keywords, how would you propose choosing which keywords that would be searched upon for a particular researcher? How would the 'top ranked upcoming cnoferences' be defined? I'm also curious if you have a sense for how much time, in general, that researchers spend trying to identify conferences to attend and submit to? If deemed valuable by reearchers, this might be a list that could be pushed to the profilees rather than them going to to get the list on their profiles.  Just a thought..

Here is one workflow:

1. Match keywords to ResearchRaven's categories. ResearchRaven lists 364 categories. That's 364 strings to match against the titles of publications, grants, clinical trials, etc. You could also match against more verbose fields such as abstracts. Here at Weill Cornell, our CTSC manually assigns one of 200+ areas of expertise from the National Center for Research Resources to each of our researchers. So if you have something like that around, you could match on that basis.

2. Sort conferences of a certain date range (e.g., 3-5 months from now) by number of times the categories it has been assigned matches the keyword corpus of your researcher. You could give more or less weighting depending on recency, whether it was in the title vs. abstract, etc.

3. Present a feed of conferences from Research Raven in that category.

4. Give users the opportunity to mark as "relevant/more like this" or "not relevant/less like this" for each conference. In those cases, increment or decrement the point value of that category accordingly. You could also upweight conference suggestions in the same category that have been marked as relevant by other researchers.

To answer your other question, I think conference recommendations are in the same boat as researcher profiles. They tend to get the most attention from researchers who are new to their profession.

What you say about recommendations being pushed to researchers rather than showing up in a profile makes much more sense.

 

Thanks for the example workflow Paul. Having a option for researchers to rate relevancy is an interesting one but not sure how likely it is that they would engage. Overall though, it seems that your idea could be a useful resource - especially for junior investigators, as you mention. Good luck!

...

Re the recommendations, another option would be to put them on the profiles with default or option to push

 

Hi, everyone. This is a fascinating discussion. I am the Web adminsitrator of ResearchRaven, so you can pretty well assume I am delighted to read all of your comments!

I am a bit confused (and I appreciate your patience with me here as I am not a scientist or an information scientist) by Paul Albert's 's comment here, "Present a feed of conferences from Research Raven in that category." Given that each category in ResearchRaven can be subscribed to via RSS or subscribed to via email alert, I am not following what would be new--except that I do see the value in rendering the info in ResearchRaven even more useful via the idea Paul suggests here, "Give users the opportunity to mark as "relevant/more like this" or "not relevant/less like this" for each conference. In those cases, increment or decrement the point value of that category accordingly. You could also upweight conference suggestions in the same category that have been marked as relevant by other researchers." I think Rachael Sak has a point when she says it might be difficult to get reseachers engaged in "relevant/more like this" or "not relevant/less like this" activity though some might if they are especially eager to follow some particularly specialized subject. And there might be some funny (or deplorable) examples of vendettas and gaming of the system.

It is hard to know what say about "recommendations being pushed to researchers" given in the info overload many of them speak despairingly of.

In any case, the RSS feeds are freely available for every category on ResearchRaven, so I hope everyone feels free to experiment with those if doing so would be useful.

Anyway, thank you for providing this stimulating forum. I am quite proud of ResearchRaven but must confess that none of your marvelous ideas had ever occured to me. Dang!

By the way, I do want to mention our sister site ScanGrants, a free online listing of grants, fellowships, prizes, and scholalrships in the health sciences http://www.scangrants.com/

Hope, thanks for your work with ScanGrants and ResearchRaven. Opening up that data allows outsiders like us to explore interesting mashup ideas, without needing to get pay or get pre-authorization — enabling innovation at the edge of the network.

Hi,  Anirvan. Well, I must say, having read your profile, that you have a pretty impressive track record when it comes to innovation. And interesting mashup ideas sound great to me!

See below

Selected comments from Reviewer(s): "Interesting idea, needs more development. Conference attendance has probably MORE to do with social and professional networking than scientific content (although this certainly needs to be there too)."

 

On behalf of Clinical and Translational Science Institute at UCSF, thank you for participating in this contest.

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