In my previous post I discussed a feature I would like to be implemented by slide-sharing services. I am not going to repeat here all the arguments why slide sharing is useful for scientists. I just want to discuss the present quality of the engines used by these services. I consider here SlideShare, authorSTREAM, SlideBoom and Google Docs from the point of view of scientists. Two years ago I pointed out to you that SlideBoom was by far the best. After two years much could have been changed in a world where nowadays everything on the Internet is about sharing.

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Ten years years ago the major computer company Sun  Microsystems advertised in all media with the slogan: “The network is the computer”. And I must admit they knew where they were talking about. They saw the clouds coming. Sun has been taken over by Oracle in 2009.

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Surviving in science these days is all about high impact. How is this impact being measured? Managers, deans,  operators, science editors and grant officers, to mention just a few non-active scientists, know the answer exactly. They judge the scientist by the:

1. number of papers published in refereed journals
2. number of papers in high-impact journals
3. number of citations, and more specifically by the h-index

To remind you: if the h-index of a scientist is 20 the scientist has coauthored 20 papers with at least 20 citations.

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