Last week we presented the public alpha version of PUSHPIN to interested researchers at the University of Paderborn. As part of the seminar series “Computer Science and Education”, the developers and supervisors of PUSHPIN introduced the service to more than 20 attendees. Since being in public alpha, PUSHPIN already has more than 100 users that contributed more than 4000 publications to the PUSHPIN corpus.
PUSHPIN is a service that aims at supporting researchers’ awareness of publications, peers and research trends. It is based on an eResearch infrastructure that analyzes scientific publications and combines the extracted data with the social interactions in an active social network. Besides the web application, PUSHPIN is also available on Android smartphones and as multitouch application.
In PUSHPIN, papers and researchers can be tagged and rated, they can be organized in private folders and can be recommended to fellow users of the service (and to others via email). Users can update their researcher profile (see my profile for example) with their research interest and affiliation(s). Doing this helps to be found by fellow researchers and contributes to institutional profiles (see the profile of the University of Paderborn for example). Users of PUSHPIN will receive recommendations for which fellow researchers to follow and which papers might be interesting for them.
Based on one’s publications, PUSHPIN provides facilities to find similar publications based on metadata (references, keywords, authors) and their full text (for example see similar papers to “All I Need To Know About Twitter in Education I learnt in Kindergarten” or similar papers to our own paper about PUSHPIN. Obviously, PUSHPIN is dependent on large corpora of scientific papers, which we’ll analyze using several tools.
For you, PUSHPIN works best when you upload your own publications or connect your Mendeley profile to PUSHPIN. In the latter case, we will synchronize your Mendeley library with PUSHPIN and analyze all your publications in order to give you recommendations and help you to explore your own research network.
PUSHPIN is another IT artefact that builds on the research conducted in my PhD project under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Peter Sloep and Dr. Hendrik Drachsler at CELSTEC. It has been developed by students of the University of Paderborn of the Computer Science Education Group over the last 6 months and received very positive feedback by our early adopters.
We now invite you to make use of PUSHPIN to support you becoming more aware of relevant research in your domain, researchers doing similar research as you do and to get an overview of the scientific output at your institution. Signup is free and can be easily done at http://pushpin.cs.upb.de/signup (you can sign up using Mendeley, Twitter or Facebook or using username and password.)
We’re looking forward to your feedback, either here, via Facebook or by dropping us a mail at pushpin@eim.upb.de
