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Elsevier Offers Social Networking Initiatives

At the heart of Elsevier’s mission and commitment to the scientific community is the aim of delivering innovative tools to researchers which help them increase their productivity and effectiveness. Whilst Elsevier’s core products such as ScienceDirect and Scopus provide a large base of content and research functionalities, social research applications, such as 2collab, complement these by providing new ways of processing information.

2collab is a social bookmarking and networking site where you can store and organize your favourite internet resources. Users can create private or public groups to share bookmarks with others – stimulating debate and discussion. Members of these groups can then work in one place to evaluate resources by rating, tagging and commenting – and also discover new researchers and information in other public groups.

Information professionals such as researchers and academic librarians have to rapidly adapt to the amount of information available online, as well as make sense of the explosive growth in social media content. Exploring online communities and sharing information is vital to the advancement of research. Elsevier is addressing this need for information literacy tools with the launch of new offerings such as 2collab and Scirus Topic Pages.

“Research tools, like 2collab and Scirus Topic Pages, can help librarians guide their users towards further scientific discovery and collaboration within their fields,” said Jay Katzen, Managing Director Academic & Government Products at Elsevier. “By developing these types of applications now, we are sharing our expertise with customers, advancing the cause of information literacy and bringing Research 2.0 tools to a wider audience.”

2collab, an online platform for scientific collaboration, supports researchers by working as a community to filter information and enhance information literacy. Scirus Topic Pages is a Wiki-like online resource for the scientific community, developed to aid researchers in their quest for quality information. By creating social spaces in which researchers can work together, Elsevier’s Research 2.0 tools offer platforms for shared knowledge to be leveraged in advancing information discovery and evaluation.

“It is important for publishers, librarians and researchers to work together to develop tools that serve the needs of the scientific community. Librarians need to stay informed of the latest developments to be able to guide and educate their users. Librarians have effectively become teachers; we are no longer just custodians of books and journals,” said Hilda Nassar, medical librarian at American University of Beirut.

Elsevier’s Research 2.0 work demonstrates its continuous efforts in delivering innovative tools that allow researchers to filter and utilize research output and further the company’s mission and commitment to the scientific community by delivering high-quality products and to invest in furthering the development of the global science and health information communities.