The whole web if full of buzz about Apples new wonder-work: a new kind of tablet computer, called iPad or iSlate. Now scholarz.net received new, absolutely trustworthy news:

The iPad will also be available as iResearchPad, bringing powerful features for scholars.

The expected e-book-reader will enable you to read all literature ever available wherever you want. We will never again need our libraries. Even better:
The iTunes Genius will be enhanced for research: it will automatically collect and display all sources relevant for your research. Through some magic algorithm all these sources will be imported to scholarz.net, excerpts will be created and stored in notes. These notes will immediately be assigned to the relevant projects you are working on.

With just a few intuitive touchscreen gestures (experts are speaking of an easy to do “four-fingers-on-your-left-hand-slide-while-circling-the-ring-finger-of-the-right-hand”-gesture) you can create high quality research papers.

But it’s not only about revolutionizing research. Teaching won’t be the same either. Due to the iResearchPads integrated HD camera and its constant satellite connection you can give and attend lectures from any place in the world. Thanks to the touch sensitive display the iResearchPad will serve as blackboard for lecturers lying at the beach.

No wonder the entire blog scene is going nuts. Let’s see what comes true on wednesday.

Today we present an example of our Knowledgeshirtz: The Gettsburg Address is a famous address and cultural legacy of the United States created by Abraham Lincoln. It was delivered at the dedication of the Soldiers National Cementry on the afternoon of 11/19, 1863. Abraham Lincoln described the reasons of the war and if a government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

(Gettysburg Address on the shop)

The Adress:

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.
Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation, so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.
But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate…we can not consecrate…we can not hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us—that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government: of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

You want Nietzsche on your t-shirt? Habermas on your bum? In our new shirt-shop we offer great motives. Great texts of mankind. Abraham Lincoln, Shakespeare, the Bible and many more. We transformed them into tag-/word-clouds and made them into t-shirts.

Wait: Knowledge and style – does it fit?

We (two of our interns) had the idea of our shirt shop, when we delivered our thesis after months of investigating, writing and investing a lot of passion – we were to happy, that it seemed impossible to stood it only in a shelf. In a lucky moment we found “wordle.net“. A free online tool which creates word cloudes on any text. After a few trials and a little bit of optimization a redesign of our thesis were born.

Our success in a cool theme on a t-shirt – our friends and fellow students were ardent. And why print it only on t-shirts, there are boxers too.

We show you at first in this series vintage work of politics, contemporary history and sciences such as literary masterworks and selected textes of law. If our project “Knowledgeshirtz” goes well, we will expand our store with more themes. Maybe it will be possible to wear your own thesis on a t-shirt.

Take a look at our motives right here.

To all readers that usually follow us via RSS feed: give us a minute and take a look at the real site. We fully redesigned the blog.

To all readers: we hope you like the new look.

In the course of redesigning the blog we also changed the URL: both language versions of the scholarz.net blog are now found on http://blog.scholarz.net. You can switch the language preferences at the top right.

When switching we had some problems with redirecting the RSS feed, so that some german posts were displayed within the english feeds. We apologize to our international readers!

Read more »

Doing research is much more than managing your references. And scholarz.net is much more than importing sources (as shown in the last few posts). If you’re looking for plain reference managers you will find better solutions than scholarz.net.

Research is about gathering existing knowledge out of sources and coming to new findings in your own research projects. So one of the big issues is gathering and structuring ideas, information, quotes, equitations, images, etc. and integrating them into your new research.

Gathering and importing sources is just the start. The core of scholarz.net is a unique “multi-dimensional” knowledge organization, helping you to utilize your knowledge. Here’s a short description:

A user gathers information (like quotes, images, excerpts) in notes (the purple boxes).

These notes are assigned to the different elements (like sources, projects & keywords) with tags. When viewing an element you get all notes assigned to it.

Example:
Note 1 is a summary of a chapter of Source I. This information shall be used in Project A and thematically belongs Keyword X.

Depending on the chosen view you see

• the content of a source (Note 1 & 2 for Source I)
• all information that shall be used in a certain project (Note 1 & 3 in Project A)
• every note, across all data, that belongs to a certain topic/keyword (Note 1 & 4 for Keyword Y).

So how does that help you with your academical writing?

When you write something new, you usually start of with reading a few sources to get an overview. Then you start writing. That’s when the searching begins: Where was that quote I wanted to cite here? Which source was I planning to use to support this proposition? Wasn’t there some idea that I haven’t mentioned yet? …

Myself for example used to write summaries in long Word documents. And when writing my papers I scrolled through endless texts, searching my information.

No more of this! With scholarz.net you can assign all the relevant information to a project, even to a certain chapter of that project, while you are reading. It’s as easy as winking: just drag & drop. And then, when you start writing, you’ve got all the data you gathered just where you need it. No more searching, no more skimming through sources, no more data-chaos. And you’ll never forget an idea or source anymore.

Or imagine another situation: you want to write a new paper to a topic you already have read about. With scholarz.net it’s only half the work as before. You don’t have to search and read everything again. Just check the keywords you need in Quotebook.net and assign the helpful notes to the new project. And immediately you can start writing and even have all bibliographic data at hand.

And if you simply want to see what a certain source is about, just check the source-view and you’ll get everything you (or others) have noted to this source.

That’s the knowledge management function in scholarz.net. It will dramatically ease academical writing.

The last days we talked about importing citations from PubMed or Reference Managers. But what if you browse online databases and catalogs and wish to directly import your results to scholarz.net?

We are working on some great tools that can directly capture any citations on any site and turn them into a new scholarz.net-source, but it will still take us some time to finish that. Until then you can achieve the same goal by making a small detour:

Most online catalogs offer the possibility of exporting your search results in Endnote or BibTeX stile.

(If you have the choice we recommend BibTeX.) So: do your usual research and then export your findings to your desktop.

Then simply upload this file as shown before.
Alternatively you can also paste the code into the field 1b.

And viola: the annotation has been uploaded. You can check it once more and import it with a click.

scholarz.net supports the import of bibliographic data in several formats, amongst others Endnote and BibTeX. Yesterday we showed how to import sources from PubMed. Today we’ll show how to transfer your library from a Reference Manager to scholarz.net, using Endnote as example.

Read more »

Gathering bibliographic data is quite a tedious task. So we developed a number of import features to help you do the job.

Today we introduce the probably most important feature for researchers in science: importing PubMed sources in four easy steps.

1. Exporting from PubMed
- Find your sources in PubMed.

- Choose “XML” in the Display-field.

- Choose “File” instead of Send in the last Show-field.

- The file containing your search results is saved on your desktop.

2. Open scholarz.net-Importfilter

- Login on scholarz.net.

- Click the Import-Link in the bottom right of the dashboard.

3. Upload file
- Choose your PubMed File saved on your Desktop.

- Select Pubmed XML in the drop-down menu.

- Click “Upload file”.

4. Check and import

- You now see all uploaded sources. Choose which you wish to import.

- Click “Import selected data” to finish .

Two more hints

- If you wish to import a single source, you might as well simply paste the code.

- Importing a greater amount of sources may take a while. Don’t interrupt the uploading. The view will automatically change as soon as everything is imported.

Why don’t you just try it. If you have any comments or further requests, we’d be happy to hear from you!

Yesterday we have launched the community function. From now on every user of “scholarz.net” can create a profile, manage contacts, find other researchers and build up his research network.

A typical social network. But: customized for the requirements of scholars and linked to their research data. You can search the public libraries of other users for interesting information and soon you will also be able to find new colleagues while searching their public folders.

To us privacy policy was of great importance. That’s why you can choose for every piece of data whether it should be seen by others or not. Thus the community offers multiple possibilities to build up networks. And if you just want to use the knowledge management functions of scholarz.net and not the community function you simply disable it.

Of course, there’s only a very basic version of the community available now, but Jens is already working on some add-ons. An advanced search, groups, messaging, a question-and-answer-platform and many more nice features will follow.

Get connected!