Archiving posted studies, news articles and other informational links into a social bookmarking site

I used to post a lot of studies and news articles in health related
usenet newsgroups including this one, but I always felt that an organized way to store these links was needed. Social bookmarking is one way to archive this kind of links in an organized way. Now since the fall of 2006 I've used social bookmarking site Magnolia (a.k.a. ma.gnolia), <http://ma.gnolia.com> for this purpose. Why Magnolia? It has a nice group feature, you can very easily create topic related groups, and it uses comma (,) as a tag separator, so you can use space in the tags. It also has a pretty user interface :-) . I've created public groups for nutrition, cancer, cardiovascular diseases, vitamin D, herbs and for some other topics. I invite everyone interested to register at the Magnolia home page <http://ma.gnolia.com> and then join to any or all the groups mentioned. After joining a group you can also post your own bookmarks into it, if you wish, or just use it for searching links that may interest you.

Cancer group now has well over 1000 bookmarks, nutrition group over 3700
bookmarks, and vitamin D group over 350 bookmarks. Cardiovascular diseases group and herbs group also have over 1000 bookmarks.

A couple of tips about searching and posting in these groups:

- I divide the the bookmarks into three categories: scientific articles
published in scientific journals, news articles (usually about
scientific articles) and bookmarks, which are neither scientific
articles nor news articles. For the articles in the first category I use
the tag STUDY (for the sake of clarity I write the tags in upper case,
although in practice i usually use lower case; case does not matter in
searches), for the news articles the tag NEWS, and for all the others
both tag INFO and INFORMATION. Thus I am able to choose only one type of
these three types of bookmarks for the search, if I so wish. In searches
you of course need to use only INFO or INFORMATION, not both.

- If the bookmark has a publication date like studies and news articles
usually have, I use publication year as a tag. Usually this is my first
tag of a bookmark, followed by STUDY, NEWS, or INFO, INFORMATION. The
year of publication is useful in many cases in limiting searches.

- I divide studies in two categories: original research articles and
review articles. For the former I use the tag RESEARCH and for the
latter the tag REVIEW. Usually I place either the RESEARCH or REVIEW
immediately after the tag STUDY. Thus you can look for only original
research articles or review articles, if you so wish. The first three
tags in the bookmark of a scientific article therefore often look for
example like

2008, STUDY, RESEARCH
or
2007, STUDY, REVIEW


Other study (STUDY) related tags:

INVITRO: In vitro study (I write it together without space, because I started this social bookmarking in del.icio.us, which uses space as tag separator and therefore it was not possible to use space in tags, and now it's too much work to edit all the old bookmarks; there is a "replace all" command, but in my experience it does not seem to be very reliable).

CLINICALTRIAL: Clinical trial (see the explanation for INVITRO above)

RCT: Randomized controlled clinical trial.

EPIDEMIOLOGICAL: Epidemiological study.

ANIMAL STUDY: Animal study.

HUMANS: A study with humans. I started to use this tag only fairly
recently, so it does dot give that many hits in searches. Leave it out
from the searches, if you get too few hits, but it may be useful to use it, when posting a study with human subjects.

MEDLINE: The study is in Medline

PEER-REVIEWED: The study is peer-reviewed


For the studies I always post a Medline reference into the description
field including also the PMID. An example:

Kimmie Ng, Jeffrey A. Meyerhardt, Kana Wu, Diane Feskanich, Bruce W.
Hollis, Edward L. Giovannucci, Charles S. Fuchs.
Circulating 25-Hydroxyvitamin D Levels and Survival in Patients With
Colorectal Cancer. Journal of Clinical Oncology, Vol 26, No 18 (June
20), 2008: pp. 2984-2991.
PMID: 18565885

If DOI is available you may want to include also that into the description field. For example, the DOI line for the above study would be

DOI: 10.1200/JCO.2007.15.1027

In case someone is interested, the link for the abstract of the above study is

http://jco.ascopubs.org/cgi/content/abstract/26/18/2984

and link to my bookmarks for this study in cancer, nutrition and vitamin D groups are, respectively,

http://ma.gnolia.com/groups/Cancer/bookmarks/tukostucush
http://ma.gnolia.com/groups/Nutrition/bookmarks/frusumaku
http://ma.gnolia.com/groups/Vitamin-D/bookmarks/brushik

The description field and title field are also searchable (this is a second search mode in addition to the tag search), and including the Medline reference will allow for example a search for any of the authors or for PMID or for any word in the title and description fields. PMID search is useful for example in checking whether a new study just about to be posted is already in the group; you can also use PMID to locate the abstract in the PubMed Medline database (<pubmed.gov>), for example in the case the link provided in the bookmark no longer works.

There are detailed instructions about how to create a Medline reference for a study in the discussion column of the nutrition group.


Some general tags:

DIRECTORY: a major site containing information about several items or topics, used usually with tags INFO and INFORMATION. Very useful, when searching for important informational sites from a group. Similar to tag PORTAL. When posting I sometimes use both DIRECTORY and PORTAL, if I can't decide which one to use. In searching use only one of them at the time.

MEDICINE

MORTALITY

PORTAL: a major site containing information about several items or topics, used usually with tags INFO and INFORMATION. Very useful, when searching for important informational sites from a group. Similar to tag DIRECTORY. When posting I sometimes use both DIRECTORY and PORTAL, if I can't decide which one to use. In searching use only one of them at the time.

PREVENTION

RISK

SCIENCE

THERAPY

TREATMENT


Some commonly used topic related tags:

BLOOD PRESSURE
BP: Blood pressure
HYPERTENSION
BRAIN CANCER
BREAST CANCER
CANCER
COLORECTAL CANCER
COLON CANCER
GASTRIC CANCER
CHD: Coronary heart disease
CVD: Cardiovascular disease(s)
LIPID PROFILE
LIPIDS
CHOLESTEROL
CHOLESTEROL LOWERING FOODS
CHOLESTEROL LOWERING SUPPLEMENTS
HDL
LDL
TRIGLYCERIDES
DIABETES: either type 1 or type 2 diabetes or both
TYPE 1: type 1 diabetes, used together with the tag DIABETES
TYPE 2: type 2 diabetes, used together with the tag DIABETES
INSULIN RESISTANCE
INSULIN SENSITIVITY
HEAD AND NECK CANCER
HNCA: Head and neck cancer
HNSCC: Head and neck squamous cell carcinoma
LUNG CANCER
MEDITERRANEAN DIET
METABOLIC SYNDROME
NUTRITION
PCA: Prostate cancer
PROSTATE CANCER
PANCREATIC CANCER
SCC: Squamous cell carcinoma
PHYSICAL ACITIVITY
EXERCISE

etc... etc...


Links for the above mentioned groups:

Cancer: http://ma.gnolia.com/groups/Cancer
Nutrition: http://ma.gnolia.com/groups/Nutrition
Cardiovascular disease(s: http://ma.gnolia.com/groups/CVD
Vitamin D: http://ma.gnolia.com/groups/Vitamin-D
Herbs: http://ma.gnolia.com/groups/Herbs


Welcome!

--
Matti Narkia
.

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