MacResearch

One of our readers, Mike Pascoe discusses the new community website for scientists, LabMeeting.

Author: Michael Pascoe
Position: Graduate Student
Affiliation: Neurophysiology of Movement Lab, University of Colorado

Social networking services build online communities of people that share common interests and are used by many people on a daily basis. While some large networks cater to personal needs (Facebook, Myspace, and Bebo), a recent entry on the networking scene, LabMeeting, is tailored to the smaller market of today's modern researcher.

Researchers create their own user profile using a university email address. The profile contains all the standard networking information plus sections relevant to your area of research (interests, summary, publications, and lab memberships). Like all good networking sites, you can grab code for embedding a banner linking to your profile to place on sites like your online curriculum vitae. Don't forget to add a flattering pic of yourself in a lab coat for good measure.

Another key section of Labmeeting is your Paper Collection. This is where you can upload your favorite research papers to share with colleagues and also to access where ever you find an internet connection. You can also recommend a paper to colleagues much like you would invite a friend to watch a video on Facebook.

I initially landed on Labmeeting.com through the Scribd blog, which recently reported on the use of it's iPaper platform to view PDFs uploaded by users of Labmeeting. While in the view paper screen you can add notes to the paper for colleagues to view and download it is a PDF to add to your Papers library.

The most interesting section of Labmeeting to me is the Lab section. The main dashboard of this section gives you a summary of all events, notebook entries, a Q&A section, and finally all papers posted by members of that lab group. I don't personally find the event section better than a simple email to my lab but if you have a fairly large lab this might be a good way to answer that burning question contained in the website name - "do we have lab meeting on Monday morning"? I really like the notebook section, which is a central location for documents such as protocols to be uploaded. This is great for the lab that uses the same forms for subjects or notes for experimental protocols. Being a senior member of my lab, it is great to refer lab mates to the Q&A section to spare me that tutorial time. If your department doesn't have a nice website yet you could definitely use Labmeeting as a platform to share information about your lab with the world by using the handy public view setting.

While you are almost guaranteed to find your lab mates on Facebook, I had little luck identifying researchers at my institution currently using Labmeeting. It will be very interesting to see whether this new kid on the social networking block can enter the bookmark bars of browsers in the scientific community.

From the editor: Have a look at Mike's labmeeting profile if you are interested in LabMeeting.