New collaborative medical encyclopedia

Thanks to Jeff Cain for sending along the link to Medpedia.com. Similar to the credentialing process of Sermo.com, users must have an MD or PhD in a biomedical field to post on the site. Harvard and Stanford Medical Schools are a few of the sponsors of the site.

We have witnessed the popularity of Wikipedia and other uses of wikis, including a book that was written completely in a wiki environment. I wonder how much traction this site will gain. The site is also intended to provide networking for health care professionals, serve as a source for patients to find information, and provide a medium for discussion of emerging topics.

I can see the potential value in this site...as a virtual reference supporting the education of future health care professionals, a method for discussion of emerging or controversial treatment approaches, a "preferred" reference for patients (vs. a Google search on the topic of interest), and a host of other ideas.

I wonder what you think. Will you point your students or colleagues to it? Will you register as an editor? Will you file it away as "not worth the time"?

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Social reference management

I've been using EndNote locally on my machine for years. With Web 2.0, we have the option to use online reference management tools that allow us to collaborate with others. EndNote Web provides this function. Connotea is a well-known tool that "grew up" and exists purely as a Web application. Others include Labmeeting, CiteULike, and WizFolio (which I have recently started using).

One feature of WizFolio that I really like is the ability to upload a PDF and let WizFolio use metadata to create a citation for the PDF. It also will go out and search for PDFs of citations that you enter maually or through an upload from your existing management software. It is free (for now) but I wonder how long that will last.

What are you using? What do you think about it?