‘@PLOSNeuro #SfN14 wrap-up and thank you

Phew!… The Society for Neuroscience’s 2014 Annual Meeting, held in Washington DC, Nov 15-19, was intense. As is the case each year, we left the convention center dizzy with new ideas for research and contacts for exciting collaborations, our suitcases packed to the brim with poster reprints. With over 30’000 attendees and more than 15’000 scientific presentations in 5 days, SfN14 presented an apparently unsolvable challenge: how could we navigate our way through this herculean program? PLOS Neuro decided to call on the community that it serves and assembled a group of almost 40 neuroscientists to cover the conference on social media.

And the experiment has been extremely successful: PLOS Neuro’s collaborative coverage of SfN14 generated 50 stories. Altogether, these stories have been viewed more than 4400 times, with Rayna Harris’s Tips for Thriving in Your Research Career alone gathering over 600 views!

The PLOS Neuro community also interviewed 8 featured speakers, offering a unique glimpse of these renowned scientists’ personalities as well as their work:

• Mahzarin Banaji
• Uri Hasson
• Leonhard Schilbach
• Eric Nestler
• Josef Parvizi
• Rob Knight and Kirsten Tillisch
• Adam Gazzaley

On Twitter, PLOS Neuro was super-active, using the hashtags #PLOS and #SfN14 to live-tweet sessions. Incidentally, we also triggered an intense debate regarding the place of social media at scientific conferences.

Thank you and see you next year!

We would like to take this opportunity and thank all the neuroscientists who participated in the collaborative coverage. Your enthusiasm and dedication were immensely encouraging and rewarding!

Dear members of the neuroscience community: whether you tweeted and blogged with us or merely read us (and even if you just found out about us), please join us next year in Chicago for #SfN15!