Conference alert! Nature Network will be putting on a science blogging conference in London later this year (mid-late August or early September). If you’re a science blogger, or just interested in science blogging, you’re welcome to come. We’re still working out the dates, but expect to hear more details here soon.
And today we released two major new features on Nature Network. Below is an excerpt of the announcement I just posted on the site.
The first new feature is affiliation networks. You’ll now be able to more easily find people from your institution. When you enter an affiliation in your profile, that affiliation is now a link that takes you to a page showing all the other NN members listing the same affiliation (eg Stanford University). You’ll find people who have entered it as their current affiliation, as well as alumni of your institution. You can also browse all the affiliations of NN members.
To make this work, we used the affiliation information that NN members had already provided in their profiles. But because members typed in their affiliations in such a variety of ways (eg “Broad Institute” is entered in four different ways), there are duplicates in our list of affiliations and people from essentially the same institution are appearing on separate affiliations pages.
We need your help. If you’re a NN member, please go to your profile; you’ll find that the affiliation you entered has been moved to a new section on the page. Next to each affiliation is an ‘edit’ link. Click on that to re-enter your affiliation. Use the full name of your institution (eg “Harvard University”, not just “Harvard”; “University College London”, not “UCL”).
You can now enter multiple affiliations separately, so if you are affiliated with two or more institutions, please enter them separately. Please also enter your past affiliations so that we can build strong alumni networks.
You can include more detailed information in your affiliation, such as the department, center or lab you’re in. Please do so using the following format:
- Jane Smith lab, Columbia University
- Center for Brain Science, Harvard University
- Department of Zoology, University of Oxford
- Jane Smith lab, Department of Zoology, University of Wisconsin, Madison
- Cognitive Psychology Lab, Duke University Medical Center
If you haven’t filled in the affiliation field in your profile, now’s your chance. Doing so will help you be better connected to people at the same institution and alumni.
This is only the first phase of the development of this feature. We will be rolling out more improvements over the coming months.
The second major new feature that went live today is two new tabbed views on the “Your network snapshot” page. On those two views, you’ll see the latest comments posted to the blogs and the forum threads that you’ve commented on. This way, you can see in one spot what others have said in response to your comments. It’s a quick and easy way to keep track of the conversations you’ve participated in.
Check these features out and let us know what you think. You can email us at network at nature.com or post to our "feedback forum.":https://network.nature.com/forum/whats-wrong