The Need For Research Maps To Navigate Published Work And Inform Experiment Planning / quote 3 of 3
Strategies for nanopublications: structured note taking
The second strategy for building research maps piggybacks on activities that are part of the research community’s typical workflow, such as note taking. From the time that they are students to the time that they are principal investigators, researchers take notes on the papers that they read. Cloud-based note taking applications (e.g., Evernote) could be used to weight, integrate, and eventually share these notes. If the workflow for note taking took the form of nanopublica- tions, papers could be transcribed into nanopublications as an automatic by- product of researchers doing what they already do. For example, a question and answer workflow could be developed for an online PDF reader. As a user reads research articles, questions about experiments are asked and, when answered, yield a database of structured notes for the user (and everyone with access to that database). This database would be useful to the user, as a simplified record of what was read, and useful for generating research maps as well.