Taming the Literature
18+ Ways to Improve your PubMed Searches
Are you getting the most out of your PubMed searches or are you wasting lots of time slogging through pages of results? We’ve compiled some top tips to help you refine your searches.
Read More How to Publish Negative Results (And Everything Else in Your Lab Notebook)
Get your data out here! Learn about several venues that publish solid data, even if they don’t support your hypothesis or tell a story.
Read More Out With the Old: New PubMed Search Tips
PubMed has had a makeover. Find out where your favorite features have moved to and what’s changed in this shiny new version.
Read More How to Read a Scientific Paper Efficiently
We show you how to read a scientific paper efficiently, so you can make the most of your reading time.
Read More Three Cool Things You Didn’t Know You Could Do On PubMed
This article provides interesting insider PubMed tips, including how to use search filters and how to set up automatic search alerts.
Read More Making an impact: Pros and cons to impact factor
How do we decide whether our research is having an impact or not? Is there a way to quantify the effect or judge the quality of the articles? Read on to find out about the nuances behind “impact factor.”
Read More Using PubCrawler: How to Speed Up Your Literature Searches by Crawling
PubCrawler automatically searches PubMed and GenBank for queries that you specify, and emails you the results, helping you stay on top of your literature searches.
Read More 7 Tips to Improve Your Literature Survey
Keeping Track of Your Literature
We show you how to get organized and develop a system to stay on top of your literature reviews.
Read More Useful Tips to Keep on Top of New Literature
Keeping track of new literature can be a time-consuming process. Here are some helpful hints and tips to help you keep up to date.
Read More How to get Organized With Reference Managers for Science – Zotero
Organizing your files is simple with Zotero; we’ve got the lowdown on functionality, usability, and access.
Read More How to get Organized With Reference Managers for Science – EndNote
Learn more about the key features of Endnote to work out if it’s the right reference manager for you.
Read More How To Get Organized With Reference Managers for Science – ReadCube
How to get Organised With Reference Managers for Science- Papers
My previous posts on reference mangers have discussed Mendeley and ReadCube. Today I will be discussing Papers, the reference manager I first encountered and the one favoured by many academics, including my PhD supervisor. For anyone who is a fan of Apple products, Papers is likely to be the software you are most familiar with.…
Read More How To Get Organized With Reference Managers for Science – Mendeley
Learn how Mendeley allows you to organize a library containing your favorite articles and generate citations and bibliographies while writing papers.
Read More How To Get Organized With Reference Managers for Science – An Overview
Check out our rundown of the key features of the most popular reference managers to work out which one will be best for you and your research.
Read More How Not to Miss (Almost) Any Article on PubMed
Reading papers (still) remains the standard way to follow advances in our field(s), to track our collaborators/competitors, or to enjoy some digressive but scientifically entertaining moments. As scientists, we read all the time. However, reading can become a highly chronophagic activity, especially when we need to perform experiments, attend conferences and write grant applications at…
Read MoreWhat Can Mendeley Do For You?
Sometimes it feels like all we do, as scientists, is read other people’s work. In which case, it’s not surprising that the first software that was impressed upon me as a new postgraduate student was for reference management. At my university, we are encouraged to use EndNote, so this is what I started on. A…
Read More Setting up a PubMed Alert in 3 Easy Steps
The easiest way to keep abreast of what’s going on in your scientific field is to set up a PubMed alert. We show you how.
Read MoreHow Text-Mining Tools Can Improve Your Literature Searches
Before starting any new research project, it’s essential that you have as complete an understanding as possible of the current research literature. Knowing what other people have done will prevent you from duplicating existing work, and will perhaps indicate under-explored niches. If you work in the same subject area over a number of years, you…
Read MoreReflect: A Tool to Aid Your Understanding of Online Articles
Learn how to use Reflect to process the text of any web page and mark up biological words and terms.
Read More Using GoogleDocs to Write Collaborative Research Papers
When it comes to writing up a research paper, there are many ways to go about it. If it’s just you doing most of the writing, with your supervisor, it is quite straightforward – you can just maintain a single copy of the document and exchange it by email. Software like Microsoft Word can track…
Read MoreHow To Read Manuscripts (and anything else) Twice As Fast
Learning how to speed read can save you a bunch of time; we’ve outlined some simple steps that will dramatically improve your reading speed.
Read More Can We Live Without Peer Review?
Jef Akst has posted an interesting article over at The Scientist discussing a new system for scientists to publish their work directly to the web without traditional journals or the peer review system. Radical, to say the least. In this system, once a group believes that their research is ready for public dissemination they can…
Read MoreReading Papers On-Screen
Reading papers on-screen is not something that everyone likes but if you can get used to it, it will help save you time and paper and make filing your literature a breeze. If you use a wide flatscreen monitor, something that is 17inch or bigger, then this tip could make your on-screen reading more pleasurable.…
Read More How To RTFP (Read the F*****g Paper)
There are, of course, times when it’s ok to just read one part of a paper. For example, if you only need to know how an experiment was done, just read the methods section or when you simply want what happened, just read the results. But much of the time this targeted sort of reading…
Read MoreIs Peer Review Broken?
This past week I found myself asking this question quite a few times. What is going on with the peer review process? Is anyone actually reviewing the papers getting into journals anymore? It is some recent experiences I’ve had with papers published in both the larger highly reputable journals and smaller niche journals that have…
Read MoreRTFP (Read the F*****g Paper)
The critical review of scientific papers is a fundamental skill for researchers. Check out our tips to get the most out of reading a paper.
Read More BiomedExperts: An Alternative Way to Search The Literature
If you have ever looked closely at Pubmed, you might have noticed that it’s not easy to search for all publications by a single author, to see everything that your collaborator has published or to see what the top people in your field are publishing. Pubmed just isn’t set up to allow you to focus…
Read More Get PDFs ASAP with Pubget
After quite a long hiatus (which included a conference in Hawaii, whoo hoo!), I’m back to highlight a cool and relatively new search engine for scientific literature that is going to make you squeal with glee (ok, it made me squeal at least). I’m assuming that you’re very familiar with how to identify relevant research…
Read More Why You Should Never Trust a Patent
If you search the literature using a comprehensive search engine like Google Scholar, you will get several types of articles listed. Most of them are peer reviewed journal articles and many are patents. But beware of an important distinction between the two: Although patents can contain useful information, they are not authoritative because they are not…
Read MoreMendeley: Easy Research Paper Management
I couldn’t do without iTunes to store and sort all of my music according genre, artist, album and even fetch the album art from the net. And I always wished there was something like this to sort the gazillion publications that I have in PDF format. Not being a Mac user, I couldn’t use Papers,…
Read MorePubmed + RSS + iGoogle = Easy Lit Updates
The simple solutions are always the best. Here is a simple but powerful way to combine Pubmed, RSS and iGoogle to keep up with the literature.
Read More New Journal Ranking Tool
Thompson Scientific is great for gaging the impact factors of various journals, but it has had a bit of a monopoly on journal rankings. As with any ranking scheme, there can be more than one valid way of comparing alternatives. Enter a new ranking tool – that’s free – the SCImago Journal Rank database. This…
Read MoreKeeping up on the journals
As scientists, we have to keep up with new research coming out and follow the journals. We all have our preferred way of doing so though. Sporadic searches on Pubmed are one way, or weekly email updates on specific search terms (also offered by Pubmed) are another. Alternatively, there’s Hubmed for RSS of Pubmed updates,…
Read MoreOpen Access to Science
The Public Library of Science (PLoS) defines the issue of Open Access Publication as: An Open Access Publication[1] is one that meets the following two conditions: 1. The author(s) and copyright holder(s) grant(s) to all users a free, irrevocable, worldwide, perpetual right of access to, and a license to copy, use, distribute, transmit and display…
Read More Better Pubmed Journal Searches
Ever get too many hits from your Pubmed searches? Using field tags allows you to generate more specific searches than keywords alone, saving you from trawling through hundreds of irrelevant articles.
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