Contributing Information to MyBio
From MyBio
This page is intended to serve as a guide to the community describing how to contribute information to MyBio. This page needs a lot of work. Check out the level of editing activity on MyBio.
[edit] How to add an entry about a web resource to MyBio
- If you don't have time to write a full annotation, add the link in the Quick Links section of the appropriate category - using your judgement and discretion to place it in order. New cutting edge tools and databases should be added at the top of the quick links section. The best stuff should be at the top of the page. It would be nice if you come back and add a detailed summary of a tool if you can.
- Try to use an example entry which you think is really good. Add the resource in one or two places, the most appropriate places.
- Don't add multiple (3 or more) of entries about a commericial tool, and never put commercial software or service offerings in multiple categories for the sake of it, and don't put commercial software in inappropriate categories.
- If you are adding software which costs money to buy, and the user license cost (for a single academic license) is less than $200, it should be marked fairware in parenthesis. Otherwise, please mark it commercial in bold in the first line of annotation.
[edit] A few do's and don'ts of adding annotations
So often when annotating newly launched web servers providing new tools I am struck by the lack of adequate documentation and methodological explanation... ask yourself the question:
what does it do and what will researchers use it for?
Authors of tools who wish their products to be widely used need to place themselves in the user's shoes (often a molecular biologist or other lab scientist, or a fellow bioinformatician). Every tool should have a standard of the "50-100 word description".
There is a need for authors to stop simply coming up with funky "Titles" for their tools which sound great, but instead focus on explaining what the tool does in a few words. The title might be similar to the title of a PubMed absract about the tool or database. If the name of the tool does have an 5-letter acronym, say what it does in the description, eg. CMLGD (Confusing Markup Language for Gene Databases) - this helps other users to find the tool with text searches.
Abstracts published on papers often fail to adequately explain the utility and application of a tool, instead focusing entirely on the informatics methods used to take an input and produce an output (what I call the gubbins, or inner workings and processes). I am often left wondering, "But what does it actually do?", this wonderful algorithm sat behind a web form with little explanation.
The description of a web resource on MyBio is an easy way to remedy this, after all, although geeks like many of us will by a computer because its processor has a 1MB level 2 cache, the users buy them mostly because they are good for word-processing and email - they make the creation of text documents and the communication of those documents easier (and supports multithreading).
Remember to add the Pubmed citation if there is one too buster, save your buddies time when it comes to write up the thesis!
[edit] How to create a new page in MyBio
When you edit a page, you can create a new page by writing the following:
[[name of your page]]
This creates a link to an empty page, which uses the name you put between the square brackets.
A page should contain an appropriate title, Protein structure is a good example, its about protein structure, and then first letter of each word is Not Unnecessarily Capitalized, because its not the name of something.
The three most important sections in Protein structure will hold true:
Categories which link here Related subcategories Protein structure - Quick Links Protein structure - Web Resources
If you can add some explanatory text at the top of the page, please do some, along the lines of "This article is a list of protein structure web resources ... "
The Quick Links section has a slightly smaller font-size, and is usually in the format of a two-column table. This should be "above the fold", ie. visible on the users screen without scrolling down the page. If there are a lot of related categories, quick links can be placed after "Categories which link here", and before "Related subcategories".
Authors of new pages are entitled to insert adverts on them, you can find out more about the GoogleAdsense and Amazon software extensions on the Software/Extensions page
