One of the main goals of microBEnet has been to improve cross-talk between disciplines with the field of the microbiology of the built environment. One way we’ve attempted to accomplish that is through a manually curated collection of all publications relevant to the field. At the time we began, Mendeley seemed the obvious choice for such a collection and so that’s where we started it. The collection now has over 1300 articles, each one of which has been manually tagged from a list of searchable keywords.
The idea was that one could search (using Mendeley Desktop) for terms like “HVAC” or “Aspergillus” and get all the papers with that term. Pretty handy we hoped.
But then Mendeley got purchased by Elsevier and we started looking for alternatives. Much ink has already been spilled by others explaining why Elsevier is so unpopular but suffice to say that we wanted a truly open-source reference collection and Elsevier seemed unlikely to provide that. Some research suggested that Zotero might be nice… but when we tried to transfer over our collection we lost the carefully curated tags. And so we were stuck. But thanks to some useful Zotero forums and a little custom script we got everything figured out and can now announce the location of our current reference collection at Zotero.
microbiology of the built environment (microBEnet) Reference Collection at Zotero.
As with Mendeley, you should really download the desktop version to actually peruse the collection, the web interface is clunky at best.
We would love it if you would join us there, and please help contribute to the collection if you’d like!
A completely accessible, searchable collection of over 400 publications specially curated for reference tot the microbiology of the built environment is available at http://IndoorMicrobiome.net.
The home page reads as follows: “You can enter any term or combination of terms in the search box (separate terms by commas) and the web site will return all papers In our database with those terms in the fields we have entered in the database based on what was reported in the published paper. The more terms you enter, the fewer papers will be returned as a response to your query. So be as specific as you can to find the papers most relevant to your interests.”
Following is a list of the fields that we have filled for each paper.
Author Last Name
Year
Title
Link to Publication
Journal
Volume
Issue
Beginning page
End page
Abstract
Keywords
citation
Comments
Environmental Factors
All Organsims
Substrates
Historical note: microbe.net started its collection on CiteULike and there still is a collection of 959 articles in the collection of the group “Microbiology of the Built Environment” there at http://www.citeulike.org/group/13359.