Archive for June 2009
RSS feeds to keep up with Science Journals
Martin Fenner gives an excellent recipe to regularly go through the papers published in the most important journals in your research field…
http://network.nature.com/people/mfenner/blog/2009/06/21/recipe-receiving-journal-table-o
We are also absolutely convinced that RSS feeds could replace TOC’s email but it is also a fact that RSS adoption is very low in general (less than 10% of companies use them) and especially among Scientists who still prefer emails
Scientists are not “alpha geeks”
“Many if not most scientists are experienced users of computers and the internet, and use email or public databases such as Pubmed on a daily basis. But few scientists regularly use Web 2.0 tools (…)
Even among those scientists open to blogs, wikis, etc., not everybody wants to follow every technology trend. This could simply be because that would take too much time, but most people probably just don’t care that much about technology. (…)
One easy solution would be to simply wait 10-20 years until most senior scientists are digital natives (those that have grown up with digital technology such as computers, the Internet or mobile phones), but that seems to be an awfully long time for something this important (…)
Fenner, Martin. How to close the digital divide among scientists. Posted on Sunday 14 of June 2009. online: http://network.nature.com/people/mfenner/blog/2009/06/14/how-to-close-the-digital-divide-among-scientists
Scientists & Internet
“it’s not without some irony that the brain child of scientists – the internet – is now developing at such a rate, that we hopelessly outpaced scientists feel the urge to plead to a private company to not abandon us poor scientists. (…) Embarrassingly, I would posit that most of today’s scientists use the internet for science at roughly the level of 1994: Browsing and e-mail. However, this should not keep us from joining the evolution of Web 3.0 and help develop Science 2.0...”
Will science ride the Google Wave into the 21st century?, http://bjoern.brembs.net/news.php?item.521.3=
Methods for comprehensive science literature reviews
The latest issue of ISTL gives an excellent paper among Tips from the experts.
The Barry N. Brown’s paper outlines “methods of conducting a comprehensive literature review for scientific topics“.
I appreciate especially handouts of the appendix that every researcher should have posted on his/her screen: outlines and tips for conducting an efficient search on databases, a search planner, main sources to know…
Nothing new but really practical…
Barry N. Brown. Research Methods for Comprehensive Science Literature Reviews. Issues in Science and Technology Librarianship, Spring 2009. Online: http://www.istl.org/09-spring/experts1.html
ScienceBlogs and Science Librarians
Good news: A new channel has been created on ScienceBlogs: it is called “Information science” and is dedicated to Science librarians and compiling most famous blogs such as Confessions of a science librarian, etc.
Shortcut to:
http://scienceblogs.com/channel/information-science
Updates for SciTopics
Best of Web: Chemistry
A directory for Chemists which is presented by the journal BioTechniques (Vol.46, N°4, May 2009, p. 255) as the “crème de la Chem”!
An organic chemist, Ph.D, Andrey Frolov, has selected 250 top sites in the field and has categorized them by sub-folders: analytical chemistry, biochemistry, etc.
