Intellectual lineages: the backbone of scientific social networks
There’s been a lot of talk recently about social networks geared for life scientists. This includes the rise of sites like Epernicus, a blog post on network portability on Nascent, and discussion of topics like shared author IDs in the Science Apps room on FriendFeed.
Today, another new site is percolating to the surface of the twitterverse: Biomedexperts. Disclaimer: I have no idea if there is supposed to be a space between those words, ala the logo for AmericanAirlines.
The cool thing about Biomedexperts is that the basis of their network is built on relationships from the published literature.
Unfortunately, I think that this strategy is blind to some of the most important types of scientific relationships: your colleagues that you might interact with on a day-to-day basis but you don’t write papers with. These are the people you bounce ideas off of, the people who help you piece together a PAGE gel after it’s dropped to the floor, the ones who feed your mice when you’re on vacation, and the ones who read your manuscript with a critical eye.
One solution might be to exploit true intellectual lineages. These are often created in niche fields by interested parties in order to create a family tree of sorts of a research area.
The C. elegans community is a perfect example. Begun in the mid 1970s by Sydney Brenner, the community now tallies at several 1000s of investigators studying directed problems in C. elegans, and tens of thousands more who use the system periodically. Because of the need to learn specialized skills for maintaining and studying the organism, most researchers associated with the community are connected in some way to the Ancestral Brenner (if you will).
In fact, these connections have been tracked by the community creating a sort of intellectual pedigree (albeit with large amounts of inbreeding). Roles like undergraduate, graduate, post-doc, RA, PI, and types of associations like collaboration or sabbatical have been duly noted. The end result? A structured, computable intellectual lineage represented as a directed acyclic graph, presented here as a graphviz graph. The perfect foundation for a social network…
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