BioSothis

For scientists, by scientists

Frequently Asked Questions

What is BioSothis?

A place for users to create their own curations. These are curated lists of scientific articles, that can be shared, viewed, and commented on. In a way, these can be considered meta-journals, with the important distinction that for copyright reasons, no full scientific articles are shared here. Rather, you can read the title and abstract and see author and journal information, and each article will always link to its proper source.
Thus, this is closer akin to a Twitter-thread: a place to share and comment on scientific articles as they are released.


How does this work?

For those interested in starting their own curation: simply sign up or login through ORCID, and start a new Curation. You can customize your curation through a banner image and writing a title and description. Next, articles can be added to a curation through a number of ways:
  • The discovery feed shows a list of new publications that match your keywords
  • A search function directly links to PubMed to find any article indexed there
  • Any article selected by other curations can be added
By subscribing to other relevant curations, new articles that potentially match your interests will show up in your article discovery feed. You can also invite co-curators to add articles they find relevant, and discuss articles before publication. This makes it simple to create a reading list for your lab, or maintain a list of articles published by your department or group.
Curations are created as private by default, so nobody can see your curation unless you decide to share it with others. If you just want to use this site to create a private reading list, that is a-okay with us!

If you are not interested in starting your own curation, this may still be useful for you. By subscribing to curations of your interest, you can be sure to not miss literature relevant for you. While there is currently not algorithm in place, with sufficient users, the articles you like may eventually help tailor your article discovery feed to other articles that might interest you.


Why focus on biomedical literature?

All abstracts and article information is currently retrieved from PubMed. Therefore, only scholary work that has been indexed in PubMed will be available. Converesely, if your work is indexed by PubMed, you should be able to find it here.
Note: due to the way this retrieval of publication information functions, there can be a short delay between when an article becomes available on PubMed, and when it can be discovered here. Since there are sometimes additional delays between when an article is published and when it is indexed on PubMed, novel work may occasionally take a day or so before showing up. In most cases, this delay should be minimal.


Why create this site?

Over the past decade or so, biomedical research has turned more and more towards preprints. This has ultimately reduced the role of journals to perform peer review, and to become the arbiters of what is, and what is not, relevant science. The glut of scientific literature has simultaneously made it increasingly difficult to keep up with relevant literature.

BioSothis aims to give anyone this power. If you believe you are better at determining what articles constitute a large scientific advance, regardless of the impact factor of the journal it's published in, then here is where you can do so. Maybe one day, peer-reviewed preprints and a site like this could reshape academic publishing as we know it.


Who is behind this?

Just me. Strangely enough, I have worked both as a full-time profesional webdeveloper (during my college years, long long ago) and as a full-time professional editor for a major scientific journal. This website is the logical culmination of my expertise in scientific publishing and webdevelopment.

Funding-wise, there is none: this has been an entirely private endevour, with no external support (financial or otherwise). A pet project, so you will. Since my expertise was always more in the backend development of websites rather than visual design, I welcome contributions from anyone with the professional know-how to improve on this. Given the current funding situation, this help would have to be pro bono.


Why the name BioSothis?

Sothis is the Greek name for the Egyptian Goddess Sopdet, who represents the star Sirius. My original idea was to go with the Egyptian Goddess of writing, wisdom and knowledge, but decided against naming this website BioSeshat for hopefully obvious reasons.
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