Maintaining a blog can be a boon to your career, increasing your profile in the scientific community, connecting you to collaborators, and helping you land new grants or jobs.
This page displays the number of entries (articles) in PubMed (Medline) published every year, that conform to search strategy (such as a phrase) you enter.
Call for the internet. As Director of the Office of Scientific Research and Development, Dr. Vannevar Bush has coordinated the activities of some six thousand leading American scientists in the application of science to warfare. In this significant article he holds up an incentive for scientists when the fighting has ceased. He urges that men of science should then turn to the massive task of making more accessible our bewildering store of knowledge.
Does scientific attention - as expressed through citations, media coverage, or practitioner knowledge - accrue to quality or reward the real contributors of breakthroughs? Or does attention in scientific publishing create a closed loop?
"Changes to student support within existing arrangements; efficiency savings and prioritisation across universities, science and research; some switching of modes of study in higher education; and reductions in budgets that do not support student participation."
Critique: An inward-looking scheme which must eventually collapse doe to failure to recruit new talent (and lack of a proper career structure will speed that up). Bye bye UK science.
If this is unstoppable, then whatever the timescale the alarm bell has to ring and businesses (not just publishers — including universities) have to accept that change is inevitable and plan quite carefully to deal with it.
Directory of Open Access Journals. This service covers free, full text, quality controlled scientific and scholarly journals. We aim to cover all subjects and languages. There are now 4381 journals in the directory.
The University of Florida, Cornell University and a handful of other schools have been awarded $12.2 million to build a social/collaborative network for scientists and researchers. The idea is to make it easier to find research and like-minded researchers in an effort to speed new discoveries.
"For adoption of new technologies in science, it has to be an order of magnitude more useful than current tools. We just don’t have the time to waste learning new tools that only marginally increase our productivity." Discussion: http://friendfeed.com/science-2-0/bceaea67/scientists-still-not-joining-social-networks
EndnoteWeb, RefWorks, Connotea, CiteULike, Zotero, Mendeley. Nice summary of the state of the art by Martin Fenner. Conclusion - not much to choose in some ways - personal preference!
This is the winning entry into the Elsevier Article 2.0 Contest by. It demonstrates how scientific article publishing can be improved by applying Web 1.0, Web 2.0 and Web 3.0/Semantic Web approaches to add value to article content. The application enhances content navigation, allows commenting on specific paragraphs and features of images, and allows facts to be asserted about the article and its contents.
A free editing service for developing country researchers who are trying to publish their work has been launched by students from leading academic institutions. The service, SciEdit, is run by a team of undergraduate and postgraduate students in Canada, Europe and the United States. They aim to provide detailed editorial feedback in accordance with the standards of journals such as Nature and Science - where many of them have been published.
Wouldn't it be great if we could just pull a formatted list of our own publications from CiteULike and fend off the timewasters? Well you can, using CiteULike. Seach your library for: +author:("cann a") +year:2008
In 2005, Jorge E Hirsch of UCSD published this paper in PNAS in which he put forward the h-index as a metric for measuring and comparing overall scientfic productivity of individual scientists. The h-index has been quickly adopted as the metric of choice for many committees and bodies.
Since the reason for the variable degree of success of online social tools for scientists is largely attributed to the lack of participation, I think a great way to pull in participation by scientists would be to offer that kind of value up-front. You give it a paper or set of papers, and it tells you the ones you need to read next, or perhaps the ones you’ve missed. My crazy idea was that a recommendation system for the scientific literature, using expert-scored literature to find relevant related papers, could do for papers what Flickr has done for photos.
The ticTOCs Journal Tables of Contents service makes it easy for academics, researchers, students and anyone else to keep up-to-date with newly published scholarly material by enabling them to find, display, store, combine and reuse thousands of journal tables of contents from multiple publishers.
For collecting and disseminating scientific information, the most popular tool is Wikipedia (70.4% of total respondents), followed by emailing peers (67.9%), and online forums (42.0%). Those pursuing professional development are most likely to email their peers (49.4%), utilize the LinkedIn network (43.2%), or visit Wikipedia (39.5%). Social networking is most popularly practiced with Facebook (59.3%), emailing peers (49.4%), and blogs (42.0%).
RAE 2008 can be criticised on several grounds but perhaps the most significant is that it is based on a view of universities that is 20 years out of date.
"free, social networking site that enables scientists, engineers, and other technical professionals to connect, collaborate with ... world-wide scientific communication and incorporates the newest social networking technologies." - "Yet another Facebook for Scientists that I am unlikely to use." http://tinyurl.com/55ngbf
The Concordat to Support the Career Development of Researchers sets out the expectations and responsibilities of researchers, their managers, employers and funders. It aims to increase the attractiveness and sustainability of research careers in the UK and to improve the quantity, quality and impact of research for the benefit of UK society and the economy.
If you’re a busy researcher juggling many demands on your time then you need to read this book. It will give you: Strategies to be more effective in your work; Strategies to balance work and other parts of your life; Specific actions that will have a big impact on your work and life.
The advent of Web 2.0 applications, which enable information sharing and virtual networking, could revolutionize science. But are microbiologists taking advantage?
Anne O'Tate: A tool to support user-driven summarization, drill-down and browsing of PubMed search results. Journal of Biomedical Discovery and Collaboration
The US National Institute of Health has become the first major US agency to require those who receive public money to make their results available to the public.
Nature Precedings is a place for researchers to share pre-publication research, unpublished manuscripts, presentations, posters, white papers, technical papers, supplementary findings, and other scientific documents. Submissions are screened for relevance