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. 2011 Oct;7(10):e1002216.
doi: 10.1371/journal.pcbi.1002216. Epub 2011 Oct 27.

BioStar: an online question & answer resource for the bioinformatics community

Laurence D Parnell  1 , Pierre Lindenbaum, Khader Shameer, Giovanni Marco Dall'Olio, Daniel C Swan, Lars Juhl Jensen, Simon J Cockell, Brent S Pedersen, Mary E Mangan, Christopher A Miller, Istvan Albert
Affiliations

BioStar: an online question & answer resource for the bioinformatics community

Laurence D Parnell et al. PLoS Comput Biol. 2011 Oct.
No abstract available

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1. BioStar offers the opportunity to ask and answer a wide range of bioinformatics-related questions.
Community members pose and answer queries on many topics. Questions and answers can be voted upon by members such that reputation points and badges are earned and help to assess the level of community respect and engagement. “Views” values can help assess the popularity of a question. Searches and tags enable users to quickly locate topics of interest.
Figure 2
Figure 2. A typical discussion at BioStar.
Discussion begins with a query, generates various answers, and yields additional comments that can lead to further information. Community voting on questions and answers contributes to reputation points and badges earned by users, along with activities such as editing and other types of participation. Question tags and automatically generated “related” questions can lead to further exploration of a topic. BioStar allows for additional answers to be appended at any time. Some questions acquire community “wiki” status if the issue is better served by a group discussion than by a discrete answer.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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