Resources - Pointing your peers in the right direction. Connotea is a "social bookmarking" trailblazer that enables scientists to quickly and easily share and tag the online resources they find valuable in their work. Mark Chillingworth pays a visit to the community, and finds that everyone's research ideas can help everyone else.(Connotea)

Since its inception, the internet has enabled people to inform anyone who cares what's on their bookshelf or the CDs they listen to. But now the idea has been taken several steps forward with the full introduction of Connotea, a free-to-use web community from the Nature Publishing Group that enables scientific researchers and information professionals to log the web resources they access and share them with their fellow scientists.

Timo Hannay, director of web publishing at Nature Publishing Group, says: "We have taken some of the latest technical and social trends on the web - notably social book-marking and tagging - and applied them in a way that we hope scientists will find useful for managing and discovering information."

By storing web resources on Connotea, users are able to access them from any web browser at any time; while the community element of the site means that users can make public what resources they access - and see the resources their peers use.

As IWR discovered when testing the site, which recently won an Award for Publishing Innovation from the Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers, scientists are not only book-marking and tagging scientific, technical and medical (STM) resources. News sources, such as The Times and The Guardian newspaper websites, are also included.

FAIR SHARES FOR ALL

Share and share alike is the central premise of Connotea, which is evident from the front page, which features two boxes. The first lists the subject tags users are predominantly researching - such as "Avian Flu" and "H5N1" when we did our site test in mid-October.

A second box features a list of the most active users, with each user name being a hyperlink through to their personal library - the set of saved and tagged resources that shows users what their peers are researching and the resources they are accessing.