How do you keep up with the literature?
Information is exploding. Just reading the table of contents from the major journals plus some interesting abstracts would take some time, not to mention the discipline needed for such habit. And yet, I was always worried that I missed out on some interesting/relevant paper. What's the solution?
Well, I have tried subscribing to journal TOCs and getting my pubmed search results sent to me weekly (set up an My NCBI account in pubmed, it's really useful). But pretty soon these email alerts were swamped in my gmail inbox, and I have many other emails to deal with. So either I ended up forget to go back to those email alerts, or that going through individual emails and find out the right piece of paper was just too time-consuming.
I wondered, if there's a simple interface where all the relevant information is at my fingertip, and I can just browse through all the relevant info (title/abstract/author) whenever I feel like it, without fearing that I lost track of something. Here's solution I started using lately, which I found quite satisfactory: using Google Reader to track pubmed RSS feed. With this trick, you can keep up with your pubmed search results through RSS feed. So whenever ANY new paper matching your search criteria comes online, it would appear in your Google Reader. You can also subscribe RSS feed of major journal TOCs from journal websites, from this website, or through pubmed. So here you go, a central deposit of all the latest journals and papers of interest only one click away (and no ads).
How do you deal with the vast amount of literature? Share your thoughts.
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13 comments:
One thing I like to do is use ISI to send me alerts every time a new paper came out that referred to a relevant paper or review. So when someone refers to Canolty et al '06 in a new publication it shoots directly to your inbox/reader. You get fewer hits, but usually each hit is on target.
Should be able to send those TOCs to your reader, too.
Lately I've just been checking here to see what I've missed.
I have not tried this targeted reference yet, except tracking who referenced my paper. This sounds like a great idea. Thanks.
I use google reader too. I subscribe to RSS feeds for a number of journals (Nature Neurosience, Neuron, etc) and science/medical blogs (nobel intent, cognitive daily, sclin's neuroscience blog ;) ) and try to keep up that way.
It's still a sisyphean task.
Note that BARF (bioinformatics aggregated RSS feeds) often provides a better interface than the journal's own rss feed, which sometimes does not include the abstract! I'm looking at you Nature publishing Group!
http://barf.jcowboy.org/
If I had read all the way down before posting I would have seen that you linked to BARF. Whoops!
I found google reader to be an extremely useful tool. It's also a much better use of my time reading news and other blogs.
what about communities. For example, the website citeulike.org allows communities to post relevant articles easily, and they get tagged with labels -- you go to your relevant community, and click on the tag you're interested in, and voila. It's like faculty of 1000 with people who are directly linked to you.
I've also tried CiteULike. The only problem I encountered is with its Endnote-export function. For some unknown reason, most of the exported references from citeulike lose their abstract in the export process. It's a great tool nonetheless.
Have you tried the bloglines reader? Up until a couple of weeks ago I used bloglines reader exclusively. It allows you to generate email addresses so you can send your TOCs to your reader. I haven't found that function in Google Reader yet since I've only been using it for a couple of weeks. Of course Google is better for integrating into the blog, etc., so that's the upside.
I get the feeds from the journals via RSS. 'Core' journals (NN, Neuron, CerCor) are ones where I browse all article names, at least. More peripheral journals (read lower impact factor, infrequent jewels) are aggregated into one RSS via Yahoo Pipes (check it out), and filtered for certain keywords.
Here's a simple example:
http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.info?_id=gPzW_m3L2xGOAp0MEpPZnA
It's decidedly low-tech, but I go to talks of interest in the greater Boston area. Always good stuff around, mostly current, and of interest.
In terms of tech stuff, I also use direct journal RSS feeds - so far only Neuron, J Comput Neuro, and J Neuro ... oh, and SCLin's Neuroscience Blog. :)
Actually speaking of, another great resource is, admittedly, popular neuroscience websites such as Biocompare Neuroscience and Medical News Today Neuroscience. They do a decent job of reporting neuro news, though not perfect, and it surely beats getting your updates in the form of the early edition of USA Today.
Like others here I mostly check this blog, along with automated weekly searches for keywords through science direct, with new results automatically emailed to me by topic.
Eurekalert is a great resource too, though of course only a very small fraction of all new interesting stuff makes it there.
I don't keep up. I can't keep up, so I have stopped trying. I set myself goals, and then gather the information needed. Instead of reading TOCs and Abstracts, I use the search engine. This method frees me some time to read bloggers who cover areas I have never heard of :-)
Very interesting!
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