The new ACM DL facilitates discussion and makes social sharing a breeze

Last week, we showed you how the “Conferences when and where” section of the new ACM Digital Library lets you explore each of ACM’s 170+ computing conferences, workshops, and symposia around the world. Now we’ll look at how the new DL’s article pages allow you to easily discuss and share research with your online communities.

At the top of the article’s abstract page you will see a group of social sharing icons to the right of the article title, and alongside the abstract itself you will see the familiar all-purpose sharing icon at the bottom of the “pill,” which facilitate sharing the article on Twitter, LinkedIn Reddit, Facebook and via email.

Additionally, the “Abstract” section itself is now a tool for sharing research with your peers and colleagues. If you read a paper’s abstract and decide to share it with your networks, you can simply highlight a piece of text from the abstract and click on the Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn logo in the dynamically-generated button to seamlessly share the highlighted text and a link to the paper with whichever network you select.

At the bottom of each article’s abstract page, you’ll find a “Comments” section where you can participate in discussion about the paper with the DL community. In addition to posting comments within the discussion thread on the ACM DL, you can also share the thread to Twitter or Facebook using the social sharing buttons above the thread or share a specific comment within the thread by hovering over the word, “Share,” which follows each comment, and selecting either Twitter or Facebook or copy a link to the comment.