Social Networking, Semantic Searching and Science « Dennis’ Blog

I recently ran into this article on Denni’s blog. It’s a very well written article.

Perhaps its my naivete but I think the answer to some parts of the questions (reproduced below) lies in looking at articles that have cited a given article (to look forward) and look at references within the article (to look back). With this information you might be able to deduce the research path, who has built upon your findings (if the article is yours) and what those findings were. Once you know the ‘who’ information, you can then possibly look up their author information to find out if they are ‘stars’ in that area.

I don’t think that alone answers it but the answers should lie hidden within information we already have in our current online publications and some of the concepts he describes within this entry. An excellent read without doubt.

Questions from the blog entry

1. “I’m researching topic X. What are the seminal papers in this area? Who are the primary researchers whose work I shoud read?”

2. “Ten years ago I published a paper on topic Y, then got distracted by grant funding in another area. I’d like to understand the full ‘intellectual lineage’ of this paper, now that others have had a chance to chew on it. What has it lead to? Have questions been answered? Have new ones emerged?”

3. “Who are the currently active researchers working on topics most closely related to my own research? Are there any bright new stars whose work I should keep an eye on?”

Read this at  http://brainoids.wordpress.com/2009/04/12/social-networking-semantic-searching-and-science/