In science, new information comes in neat research papers, and the database for these papers is PubMed. If you are a scientists or a science student, you probably cannot live without PubMed, literally.

But PubMed has come under a lot of criticism lately, and that has given rise to startups such as JournalReview and Biowizard. Now there is a new startup in town by the name of Ologeez! At the moment there is only one Stanford grad student behind it all, but the beta version looks promising.

Ologeez is not just a new interface for PubMed! With this site users can give a “thumbs-up” or a “thumbs down” for each article, which in turn will eventually place the most popular articles on the top of the search results. Users can also upload the abstract of articles not featured on PubMed.

When you sign up, and assume a profile on Ologeez, you get your own library, where you can access all the articles you have uploaded, commented on, rated, tagged, etc., so that you will never have to keep anything on your hard drive anymore. This makes keeping track of information much more easy.

You can start your own WikiGroup on Ologeez. This can be the Wiki of your research group, your class, or company, and you can choose to make this Wiki public or private. Free services of this feature are: calendar with group editing, news board, publications list, protocols, photo albums, group forums, and privacy controls.

While Ologeez was not meant to be a Facebook-type community site for scientists, you can keep track of your colleagues, who have already signed-up. You can leave them private notes, and you can view their ratings and comments about research papers.

Here is a video about uploading an abstract to Ologeez:

You can always check out the website’s tour, and if you like what you see sign-up to become a member today!

Further Reading:

• Ologeez! website
• Another 10 great Web 2.0 tools for Diagnostic Imaging Professionals
• Biowizard
• JournalReview

- Andras

Stanford students are nothing if not entrepreneurial. Only a couple months after reporting on Ologeez (out of the Genetics department), I receive an email about Labmeeting.com, the product of a group of students in Vijay Pande’s lab, headed by a graduate student in the Physics department created by three folks who knew each other from their undergrad days at Harvard, one of whom is now a biophysics PhD student at Stanford.

The website grew out of their desire to “solve some of the organizational problems we’ve encountered while doing our Ph.Ds”, and includes a PDF organizer, a space for labs to share protocols and files, and mechanisms for discovering and recommending papers.

After registering and doing a brief tour, it appears to be a well thought-out and executed entrant into what is starting to become a crowded market for tools that help you organize, search for, and share papers, or tools that help your lab share data and files. Because of the many offerings, however, some with much earlier and more widespread adoption, I’d be surprised if Labmeeting gathers much of a foothold. Then again, it’s not claiming to be another OpenWetWare, so if it does what it does well, perhaps those looking for a smaller feature set (and a bit of relief from social networking) will find it just right.

Stanford PhD student Jason Hoyt in the Department of Genetics was fed up with the inadequate presence of literature resources on the web, specifically good discussion surrounding papers, so he’s set out to build his own website that would allow users to post, rate, and discuss papers, in addition to other features. Jason says,

Hey fellow colleagues and grad students. So, about a year and a half ago I got tired of the lack of good discussion around research literature online. For instance, what was the best review paper in the field of a new research project I was about to start? So, I started building a website.

What I ended up with was:
-A citation manager called ‘My Libraries’ (easily download papers to EndNote)
-A lab database called ‘WikiGroups’ for any lab in the world
-A protocols database
-A paper search that gives better results than PubMed (this depends on you adding more
papers)
-Import papers from PubMed
-Contact or colleague manager called ‘Notes’
-A ‘My World’ page that gathers all the latest from your colleagues, lab group activities
and school seminars.

It’s in beta, so please report any bugs or feature requests (form available on all pages).

It’s called Ologeez. From the plural of the suffix “-Ology,” it refers to every branch of learning. If you find it useful, let other departments or schools know.

After very briefly exploring Ologeez, it seems like a competent addition to the handful of other science oriented resource and knowledge sharing websites currently available. OpenWetWare offers lab websites and shared protocols, but doesn’t have literature-oriented resources. PLoS ONE has a journal club feature, but just for PLoS ONE and PLoS doesn’t host lab websites or protocols. Laboratree and SciLink offer nice networking and some content management features, but don’t support lab websites and literature discussion is indirect at best. Although Ologeez has very few users and entries right now, people may find it useful to be able to set up a lab presence with shared protocols and papers, post and discuss interesting papers, and keep up to date with what their colleagues are doing, all in one website. It includes categories for all branches of science and research, including business/econ, law, and math.

Given its inclusiveness, it has the potential to spread school-wide, though it’ll be interesting to see if it catches on enough for the discussion and search features to be useful.