jprenaud.info

Keeping track of papers

JP Renaud | February 25 2008

I am back from a trip in France visiting Electricit� de France last week and I have now a lot of paper reading to go through. “A lot” is actually 323 unread papers published or “in press” in a range of journals over the past few weeks. Keeping track of papers as they are published, as you discover them and as you read them takes a substantial amount of time for an academic today. Luckily technology is your friend for that type of problem…

The problem
It is not really easy to keep track of recently published papers as there are so many journals and publications nowadays. I believe that there are two main issues with keeping track of papers for a scientist:

How can I be notified of recently published papers, even when I am not actively searching for them?
How to best organise a (growing) library containing all the papers I have discovered/read/annotated?

Being notified of new content
Luckily technology is your friend for problems like that. Indeed today, most publishers offer “web feeds” which are ideal to be automatically notified of new papers.

Web feeds are a popular way to be notified of a change on a website. A feed contains a summary of what has changed, the date of the change and also a link to the original. The websites which contains web feeds usually display a specific icon (shown on the right). For information, subscribing to a podcast is simply subscribing to a web feed that happens to contain audio or video content.

You usually manage a set of feeds using a “feed reader” or “feed aggregator” which will keep a eye on a set of feeds and update you when one of them has changed. There are a range of feed readers available. The latest editions of Mozilla Firefox and Microsoft Internet Explorer for instance allow the user to subscribe to feeds directly. I personally use Google Reader, an online service from Google. I like it because it allows me to access my feeds even if I am not using my own computer. Microsoft and Yahoo offer similar services.

This is what my “Google Reader” looks like at the moment:

On the left hand side is a list of all the feeds I have subscribed to. The main panel on the right contains a list of all unread articles that I need to go through, where they were published, when and the title. Google reader offers a range of keyboard shortcuts to quickly “mark as read” the articles that don’t interest you. When you are interested in an article, you just click on it to see an extended summary and then a button allows you to navigate straight to the journal website if you require more detail.

Some useful feeds for the hydrologist

It took me a while to build my list of feeds so here is an extract of my feeds related to hydrology.

Some journal don’t seem to offer web feeds but luckily the ZETOC service in the UK generates feeds now. So here area few for which I had to use ZETOC:

Organising a personal library

Now that you have found the papers that interest you, you have to file them in your personal library. I believe that , again, this is best done using online services.

I personally favour CiteULike, a web based tool that allows you to organise a library of papers online. It comes with plugins which allows you to extract information out of most publishers websites (Wiley, Elsevier, AGU, Sciencedirect etc…) by pressing a specially crafted bookmark button called a bookmarklet. As CiteULike is a “Web 2″ or “social” service, you also rate papers, tag them or share them with others using the notion of groups. For instance, we have set-up a UoB-Hydrology library for the members of the Hydrology Group at Bristol University.

I discovered CiteULike about 18 months ago and have been using it extensively since. It is a very nice way to organise your collection of electronic papers. Have a look at my library and you could even subscribe to my library using a web feed too!
It is also possible to import/export to EndNote, therefore it can be used with Microsoft Word but it’s not directly integrated like EndNote Web. It’s a free, community based initiative. There is a proprietary equivalent called Connotea pushed by the Nature Publishing Group.

Outlook

Using web feed and a virtual library makes it a lot easier to follow the publications of scientific papers. I wish it was even easier though. I guess in the future, publishers will offer web feeds that for a set of keywords rather than the name of a journal. These keywords (or tags) could even them be automatically be used in the virtual library.

In a way, it is already possible! You can search for “groundwater hydrology” on ScienceDirect for instance and subscribe to a web feed of the results, i.e. your search is alive on and the feed will notify you of new hits in the future. I need to investigate that in more detail more actually.