Early examples of curation on Sciety

We have been working on the features to help make curation easier with Sciety recently. We also facilitated a discussion on the role of curation and how it enhances preprint review at last week’s ASAPbio #FeedbackASAP event. There are some good examples of curation happening with researchers using Sciety and we thought it was interesting to highlight these.

Case Study: Prachee

Associate Professor in Biochemistry and Cell Biology, Prachee Avasthi is prolific in her sharing of preprints recommended reading with members of her lab. She used Twitter and Slack to achieve this, which meant the content was not as openly available as it could have been. We invited Prachee to try using Sciety. Now she can save her recommended articles in one central space, increasing access to them, not just for her lab members but for anyone who is interested.

Prachee Avasthi's reading list is now popular, with dozens of subscribers to the weekly digest we send out and attracts hundreds of visits to the list page on Sciety.

Case Study: Kenton

Kenton J Swartz is a Senior Investigator in the area of biophysics. His list documents preprints that he is interested in or would like to recommend for others to read. This list also garnered a lot of interest from his immediate field and beyond.

While we support the direct curation of lists by Sciety users and members of groups, we also have auto-generated lists that contain all of the preprints a group has evaluated. For example, the best way to find all of the public preprint reviews that eLife has produced is to look at their evaluated articles list, similarly for Review Commons. COVID-19 researchers might find the complete list of evaluations on Sciety from NCRC and Rapid Reviews:COVID-19 useful too.

Having people use Sciety to curate lists of preprints has resulted in some useful feedback for us. It is possible to share the address of your list page on Twitter or via email, but we also want to surface lists across Sciety pages to make them more discoverable. We are exploring the idea of showing whether an article is a member of a list on each article page, highlighting recent lists on the landing page and home page, and finding ways to have lists and users appear in search results. We have also heard that a sharing button for lists and the ability to filter, re-order and sort lists would be appreciated, along with multiple lists that can be named and given context.

Would you like to curate a list or need help setting up one, get in touch with our Outreach Manager, Godwyns who will work with you to get your list going. Or just give it a go and let us know so we can promote your curation activities.