Academic Productivity

The “beyond my mind” blog has a post comparing different academic search engines. The author also describes his search strategy:

The way I search for scientific articles is pretty simple. Say I have a problem to solve that was assigned by some course teachers or my research supervisor. I mark some keywords and Google for them. If I don’t find any relevant information I use combination of those keywords or use alternative keywords adapted from the search results. Once I start getting some keywords that produce relevant results in Google, I pass it to Google Scholar. Sometimes I go to some other subject specific search engines to search using those keywords

I use Web of Science, because it can track cited articles. This is also present in google scholar, but somehow I don’t find it as reliable. I tend to sort by citations, and pay attention to the top few papers only. I guess if most people do like me, there must be a snowball effect going on here, with a ‘rich gets richer’ situation.

Search engines are measured using precision and recall. This is of course relevant, but sometimes more mundane measures are interesting too. The basic unit for productivity evaluating search engines should be something like “time (or clicks) needed to get both the full text and the reference to your hard drive”. Here, small inprovements in usability like going from 21 to 16 clicks to achieve your goal can save quite a lot of time, since we academics use search services so often.

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 Mike Kaspari has a detailed piece on procrastination. The basic ideas he proposes to break procrastination streaks are solid advice. For example he proposes to start with a burst of timed activity (even if it’s just a 5 min burst). He recommends writing a list of reasons why we are not doing that important task (and looking at how silly they are). An interesting one is that he advocates getting together with your buddies to do a “writing fest” before going to lunch, and use social pressure to get some writing done.

Link to 5 ways of breaking the procrastination habit « Getting Things Done in Academia

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Brazil (the movie) describes a society in which the Ministry of information retrieval dominates every aspect of society and there is a form to be filled for every action. One can even get a receipt for a husband (after filling a form that acknowledges receiving that receipt).

This was supposed to be funny, but I have had similar experiences in the academia. Buying a computer or a chair from one’s own funding can be as laborious (and in the UK at least, this is only possible from a selected list of providers that have agreements with the University). The record for me was a chair that took over 3 months to materialize in my office after doing all the ceremonial paperwork, and a number-crunching machine that I never bought because going through the standard providers resulted in a tag doble the market price.

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Dan posted in his blog that he had managed to get seven papers out in the open literature in January. I had to interview him.

AP.com: How do you manage your daily workload?

Dan Navarro: A lot more pragmatically than I used to. I put an hour or so aside each morning to cover the miniature administrative rubbish - it’s not really enough time to do it properly, but I’ve started to realise that most of it doesn’t matter very much, so I can cut-and-paste a lot of things (Incidentally: never throw away a good piece of bureaucracy-speak, like a research profile or a course description. You can reuse it about 10 times before anyone starts to care). I tend to do intellectually heavy things throughout the morning and into the early afternoon. I tend to take a bit of a siesta in the late afternoon - I don’t sleep, but I do switch off a bit (sometimes I do paperwork). I find this makes it easier to do something useful in the evening.

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Ok, I think this is a class-A hack. This may be one of the biggest timesavers I have found in recent years.This might be obvious, but if you spend a lot of time writing, then any number of keystrokes that you save, as small as it might seem, will result in large time savings.A word autocompleter is a program that learns what you type most often and suggests it in real time while you are writing. I’m still wondering why this kind of functionality doesn’t come with the OS, because it is really straightforward to implement and useful beyond words. Some of you who have used unix shells or text editor are used to completing words by just pressing a key (tab is my favorite). Well, guess what, you can have that anywhere, not only on the shell: you can have completion in a word processor while writing papers. Of course, it’s handy to fill textboxes in any browser and write emails.Some may think that saving a few keystrokes is not necessary a big time saver and that they type fast enough. Well, believe me, you haven’t tried one of this programs!  (more…)

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On the recent Google group The Efficient Academic, there was a short discussion about the best music to study to. Obviously this is a matter of personal choice to what kinds of music creates a calm relaxed focus state of mind. Most people find that non vocal music is the least distracting. Favourites of mine are classical, with artists like Bach and Mozart, Chopin and most baroque period work. I also like to listen to droney ambient, such as Brain Eno and Stars of the Lid - and often leave a Pandora radio station with “artists similar to” them (if you haven’t tried Pandora I highly recommend trying it out). Internet radio station Dronezone on Soma.fm is also excellent for this kind of “music”.

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