How do you keep up on the literature in your field?

Dr. Isis, who writes the blog “On Becoming a Domestic and Laboratory Goddess” answers the question in detail, describing how she used to monitor the literature in her field, includes praise for journal clubs, and finishes with her electronic means for keeping up.  I’ll skip to the bottom line about her electronic ways of exploring and keeping up.  First, for exploring, she recommends Web of Knowledge (scientists might want to use the Web of Science tab) to learn about the literature in a new field.  For those of us who used to use the tiny-print version of Science Citation index, this online version is much easier to read, and the citation maps are much more fun to explore.  This is an easy way to identify the important authors in a field.

To keep up with what is new, Dr. Isis discusses personal contacts, journal clubs, and using RSS feeds.  She has set up RSS feeds from the table of contents from the publications she generally reads, and then reviews them when she can.  Those of us who used to use Current Contents in print form appreciate not having to wait for the department copy.   She has also set up RSS feeds from PubMed for her favorite search terms.  Using RSS feeds in these two ways means that information comes to her, and she can review it when she has time (Sunday morning, for example).

Read Dr. Isis’ blog post for a less, err, dry explanation;  Dr. Isis publishes scientific research papers, but her style in her blog is much more informal.  The comments on her entry contain even more ideas for exploring the literature and keeping up.

For help with any of these tools (and many more ideas) for those at Duke, please contact the librarian for your subject.  Several librarians I consulted about this post suggested that running searches on Google Scholar can augment search results from other sources.  In addition,  arXiv.org provides author-contributed e-prints in physics, mathematics, computer science, quantitative biology and statistics.

1 thought on “How do you keep up on the literature in your field?

Comments are closed.