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We can’t quite believe it but F1000Workspace has now turned 4! My, how quickly time passes! Since we launched F1000Workspace in May 2015, researchers and clinicians from 24,000 higher education institutions and 194 countries have signed up for our suite of tools to help them keep track of the articles they’ve read, discover new articles, collaborate with co-workers, and write their own articles.

Together, they have created over 230,000 projects, generated 1.5 million annotations and have saved more than 12 million references to their F1000Workspace projects! That’s a lot of work…

We are very proud of everything we have achieved so far but despite all our accomplishments, we’re not stopping there.  To help you work, share and write effortlessly with colleagues across the globe, we want to keep working and improving to make sure our products continue to give researchers greater choice, reach and flexibility.

The Bigger Picture

At F1000, the quest for open science is the driving force behind everything that we do. The central goal of open science is to increase research quality, boost collaboration, speed up the research process, make the assessment of research more transparent, and promote public access to scientific results. In order to achieve this, it requires support from much more effective tools and technology to remove some of the time-consuming hurdles in the discovery, discussion and assessment, and then the communication of research findings.

That’s where F1000Workspace comes in. We believe reference managers can no longer be just that; they must become fully equipped to provide researchers with an accessible place to discover, collaborate, discuss and create their work in an effective, open and transparent format. Then there is also have the option for the completed work to be published on F1000Research, our open access publishing platform.

F1000Workspace is designed to not only support collaboration but also encourage sharing and discussion. Our highlighter tool allows you to bring in references from across the web and discuss them with your team and our one-click add-on tool makes it even easier to quickly save and store your references all in one place.

We’ve also been working hard to make our features as smart as possible, by utilising learning features to improve as you interact with it. This includes our smart-article suggestions which searches for the literature highly relevant to your project and smart citation suggestions which helps make sure you don’t miss out a key reference in your article (available in both Word and Google docs). 

Another example of how F1000Workspace ensures users can discover relevant articles to their research is through our partnership with CiteAb. This additional functionally has enabled researchers to see which antibodies have been cited within papers they’ve stored in their projects and provide information about the antibody’s application and reactivity.

We have implemented these features to ensure that transparency and sharing within research is as seamless and easy as possible. We’ve also working hard to continuously improve our service by adding new features. Check out our new and upcoming updates below to find out what we’ve been working on to make F1000Workspace the reference manager to use for the future of open research.

New features

Convert a document with Mendeley or Zotero citations to F1000Workspace

If you started to write a manuscript using Zotero or Mendeley or if one of your collaborators did, you can now convert these citations into F1000Workspace. Just click the Update citation button on the F1000 tab in Word. References that are not in your library will be created and added to it.

New reference types and styles

In addition to our current CSL styles of over 8000 styles (e.g. APA, AMA, Chicago, Harvard, MLA, Vancouver etc), we have now made the list more extensive and added even more CSL styles to F1000Workspace. We have also added new reference types including artworks, broadcasts, films, maps, newspaper articles, hearing and legal cases.

Trending articles

F1000Workspace will now show you a summary of articles in your area of interest which other F1000Workspace users are interacting with – you can compare these across different time periods and then add any relevant articles to your projects where they can help finetune your article suggestions.

F1000 browser extension

Save references with the click of a button as you browse the web with our browser extension. When activated it will search the page metadata for all the information you need for a citation, and enable you to annotate any particularly relevant text or images at the same time for later reference (if you later share the reference with a colleague then these annotations can also be shared if you like).

Smart citation Suggestions

If you need help finding a citation source when you’re writing using our plugins, simply place your cursor at the end of the statement you need a citation for and use our Smart citation Suggestions tool. We will analyse the text and suggest relevant references to you to make sure you don’t miss any major work in the area.

Onwards and upwards

At F1000Workspace, it’s very important to us that we hear your feedback so we can use it productively, to ensure our service is the absolute best it can be. As a result of your comments and the hard work of our team we have a lot of exciting and innovative features on the way.

To keep updated on exciting updates, make sure to follow us on Twitter.