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Gobbledygook
Martin Fenner's blog on scientific publishing in the internet age.
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How do you read papers?
Date:
Sunday, 02 Nov ember 2008
Working in science is as much about reading papers as it is about writing papers. There are usually two ways you can come across an interesting scientific paper:
+ Active Searching. Literature search on a particular topic
+ Passive Browsing. Scanning the literature in regular intervals for papers of interest
The focused active search is typically used when you collect information for a research project or write a paper or grant proposal. This is stuff for another blog post and can be better explained by a science librarian like Oliver Obst or Frank Norman. Now I want to talk about different ways to keep track of the current literature in your field. I would assume that most if not all people involved in science do this in one way or another, and I also think that many people are struggling with the best strategy (see Richard’s related post on this topic: Too many fish in the sea).