Connotea: a site for scientific communication and information sharing on the internet

Abstract

The Internet is recognized as a fruitful soil for scientific communities, because of its rapidity, diversity and possibilities of new forms of interaction. The development of sites of social bookmarks, as Connotea’s, allows researchers to manage information on the Internet, organizing and sharing references with their scientific peers. We analyze this site, which has a social character and presents itself as a new informal space for information sharing, group creation and proprietary libraries construction by using keywords. Also, we approach scientific communities concepts, social bookmarks and Folksonomy. We consider that Connotea reproduces some common behaviors of scientific communities and allows the interchange among different areas of knowledge.