Weblog Archive

Quick Online Expansion of a Scientific Paper's Discussion

HubLog: TrackBack. For those of you who are absolutely confused about blogging and trackback, take heed, I will try to discuss what they are here (at least what I understand of it). I will then move onto why these tools are great vehicles for scientific discussion online.

Blogging is simply an online diary. What you are reading is my blog, my online diary. The topic of discussion in this blog is solely under my own discretion. In my case, I blog about my trials and tribulations as a grad student. Currently there are just about all types of blogs that discuss just about anything you'd imagine out there in the Internet. Finding these blogs is as simple as doing searches at www.feedster.com, www.weblogs.com, or www.blo.gs, which are just a few sites available.

So what is TrackBack? For many of you who don't blog, TrackBack is like riding a bike. It's easier just to do it, than to try to explain how to do it. Here goes: TrackBack is the ability for me (as an example) to comment on another person's blog entry on my own blog, rather than commenting on that other person's blog. However, for me to have an entry in my blog to refer to another's blog entry, the original author of the first entry must enable that particular entry to record TrackBack links. In this way, for those visiting the original article, just following the "TrackBack" link will list all the other blogs in the Internet that refer back to the original--hence, you see why it's termed "TrackBack," i.e. it tracks all the blog entries that refer back to the original blogger.

Scientists, for some odd reason, are slow adopters of certain technologies, such as this--this is particularly because the usefulness of this technology has not been tested too well. How can blogging and trackback be useful in science publishing? First off, imagine the ability to provide critical comments about published papers on your own blog. Now, imagine hundreds of scientists in your field doing the same after undergoing their own independent analysis of the same paper. Lastly, imagine you (say as the budding scientist or student) were able to easily find all these blogs and read each individual analysis. Your potential for developing this critical thinking has at least grown additively with each entry (the power of hundreds vs. the power of one)!

To cut to the chase, there is now one place where you can "TrackBack" to published biomedical papers. I've provided a link to this search engine above and here: http://www.pmbrowser.info. Simply, if you have a blog already running (oh, you don't? then try MovableType, the link is to the left) you merely need to search for the paper you want to "TrackBack" at pmbrowser.info, and then when you're at the abstract view of the paper that you would like to comment on, go ahead and blog that particular page. In MovableType's blog engine, it automatically knows that the page/article is "TrackBack"-able. Blog as usual, and from this point on, whenever a person goes through pmbrowser.info to search for articles, s/he will be able to find your blog entry commenting on that particular paper. Now if only more scientists knew about this feature--with this new budding technology, there needs to be a critical mass of users for this service to be worthwhile and useful. Please consider doing so and the world would be a better place. Confused? Would like to know more about MovableType? Comment here and we can continue on with the discussion.

Posted by johnvu at April 24, 2003 12:48 AM