Academic Productivity

As an ultimate LaTeX addicted, I hate to admit that there is nothing in the TeX universe comparable to the amazingly simple and intuitive revision tracking system that Microsoft implemented in Word. OpenOffice apparently has an equally powerful version control system built in its Writer.

Those of you who ever ventured into the territories of TeX-based collaborative writing certainly know how painful it can be to keep track of changes among several authors in TeX. TeX sources are raw text, so if you need proper diffing or revision tracking you will probably have to resort to some revision control system (such as Subversion or Git). Revision tracking via RCS, however, can be a nightmare to set up and learn to use fluently if you’re not already familiar with some basic notions of software revision control.

After an ugly lot of email exchanged with coauthors to let each other know who was doing what with a manuscript, I decided to search the Web for an answer.

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(Conference announcement via Gerry McKiernan)

Science in the 21st Century: Science, Society, and Information Technology

Waterloo, Ontario, Sep 8-12, 2008.

Times are changing. In the earlier days, we used to go to the library, today we search and archive our papers online. We have collaborations per email, hold telephone seminars, organize virtual networks, write blogs, and make our seminars available on the internet. Without any doubt, these technological developments influence the way science is done, and they also redefine our relation to the society we live in. Information exchange and management, the scientific community, and the society as a whole can be thought of as a triangle of relationships, the mutual interactions in which are becoming increasingly important.

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Following up on Jose’s musings on good and bad keywords for a productivity blog, I came across an interesting tool to visualize the evolution over time of aggregated social bookmarking tags for popular websites. It is actually a pretty old project called Cloudalicious created a few years ago by Terrell Russell (of ClaimID fame).

If you are a web metrics maniac like yours truly, you won’t resist plugging this tool into your favourite websites, so here’s the graph I generated for AcademicProductivity.com:


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According to a study by research firm Basex recently covered by the New York Times, information overload will be the Problem of the Year in 2008, costing US companies up to $650 billion a year. The figure is supposed to be an estimate of the cost of unnecessary interruptions in terms of “decreased productivity and stifled innovation”. Recipes to fight email overload, in particular, have become a thriving business over the last few years: how to cope with the stress and lack of productivity caused by an ever-growing volume of email in your inbox?

While self-proclaimed gurus are selling on the Web their own ultimate solutions against email overload, Carolin Horn from DMI Boston has designed a clever visualization tool to represent unresponded email in your inbox. I find this idea way more effective than a million GTD techniques and I think Carolin and her coder collaborator Florian Jenett are onto something.

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There are several dedicated packages to typeset a curriculum vitæ or a resume in LaTeX, such as europecv or ecv. For some reason I’ve always found these solutions not flexible enough to suit my needs. This is why I opted for a standard (article) class as a basis for my CV.

Some TeX distributions such as XeTeX allow you not only to benefit of the advanced typesetting features included in LaTeX, but also to use in your documents expert fonts such as Hoefler Text, Adobe Minion, or Adobe Garamond Pro and to edit TeX sources in your native (Western or non-Western) writing system.

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Kevin from CiteULike wrote in to let us know that they introduced a number of new features. Beside some new user-oriented features (e.g. an editable profile and the possibility to create a blog), the most interesting additions are those that extend group functionality.

Using an online reference manager to share a reference pool among members of a team or project is a brilliant idea, but the previous implementation of groups in CiteULike was pretty poor. The recent upgrade addresses some issues of the previous version and introduces interesting new functionality that should make team-based use of a reference pool snappier and more usable.

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Online reference managers are extraordinary productivity tools, but it would be a mistake to take this as their primary interest for the academic community. As it is often the case for social software services, online reference managers are becoming powerful and costless solutions to collect large sets of metadata, in this case collaborative metadata on scientific literature. Taken at the individual level, such metadata (i.e. tags and ratings added by individual users) are hardly of interest, but on a large scale I suspect they will provide information capable of outperforming more traditional evaluation processes in terms of coverage, speed and efficiency. Collaborative metadata cannot offer the same guarantees as standard selection processes (insofar as they do not rely on experts’ reviews and are less immune to biases and manipulations). However, they are an interesting solution for producing evaluative representations of scientific content on a large scale.

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In a previous post I presented some considerations on the impact of online reference management (ORM) tools on one’s productivity. I haven’t mentioned yet another major advantage of using social software for managing references: the possibility of using dynamically generated feeds to track things you are interested in.

We already reviewed some potential uses of feeds for academic purposes (read more from shane and jose). In this article I focus on the use of flexible feeds in ORM tools as a strategy to discover recent and valuable references.
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The November 2006 issue of PLoS Computational Biology has a short editorial with ten rules for evaluating postdoc opportunities. An interesting — albeit commonsensical — collection of hints, if you’re approaching the end of your PhD and looking for job opportunities after your defense.

Ten Simple Rules for Selecting a Postdoctoral Position

Thanks Benoît for the pointer.

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I receive from Itiel Dror (Southampton) the announcement of a relevant call for paper for a special issue of Pragmatics & Cognition, focusing on learning technologies:

Learning technologies have been taking an increasing role in almost all learning environments. They are used in a variety of informal and formal educational environments, from early years to university level and throughout adulthood, as well as in many commercial, industrial, and governmental settings. With the greater use of learning technologies it is critical to better understand how they interact with human cognition. Both in terms of how they may facilitate and enhance (as well as hinder) learning, and also in terms of how they affect the way we learn and acquire information, and the nature of cognition.

The full call for papers is available here.
(Deadline for submissions: 30 June 2007)

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Jay Myung, a psychologist at Ohio State University, has a number of interesting links to articles and tutorials on academic productivity on his personal website.

Some of these articles are targeted at young researchers/grad students starting a career in specific scientific domains, but they contain a lot of useful general-purpose advice.

I post a slightly annotated version of Jay’s list as a teaser for an actual links section to appear soon at academicproductivity.com.
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Externalization. Distributing workload across a number of nifty, personalized Web-services: that’s the mantra of Web 2.0 advocates. Although I tend to be quite skeptical about this kind of marketing, there are a few cases in which a Web-based tool can radically change one’s work habits. In the case of academic work, online reference management is one of these happy exceptions.

This post is the first in a series advocating in favor of free online reference management services (such as CiteULike or Connotea) as solutions that are likely to substantially improve one’s productivity (whether or not you qualify as a geek).

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