Social Networks
Science Social Network Compiles Latest News, Studies
The science resource site Sciencia.org has now become a crowdsourced social network that synthesizes the latest scientific news, studies, and resources from journals, books, and websites into something resembling Wikipedia meets a Facebook News Feed.
Sciencia was founded in 2000 by a group of science enthusiasts at Kyungpook National University in Daegu, South Korea. Since then, the site has evolved from a static scientific computing system to a network updated in real time with thousands of volunteer content submitters.
Currently, more than 64,000 users monitor nearly 8,200 journals covering the broad spectrum of sciences, from biology to geography, sharing about 3,000 new articles every day. Users can browse content by subject area, or see the most popular or the most recent content posted on the site. The site will also suggest up to ten related articles to help simplify compiling reference lists.
Since content can be posted in real-time, the delay between original publication and appearance on the site is typically less than two days.
The site's most popular category is Biology, which is divided into ten subcategories including Agriculture. The Agriculture category currently covers 245 journals and contains more than 34,000 articles.
To help minimize the appearance of unqualified stories and spam, each submission is reviewed by the site's staff and/or content-filtering algorithms.
About the Author
Stephen Noonoo is a reporter, contributing editor and consultant specializing in education technology. He is on Twitter @stephenoonoo.