Today I am going to share a few of the programs (on windows) that make life a little bit more easier and I can’t live without. We  might make this a series if the other ap.com bloggers want in the action.

Hotkey management and Swiss army knife – AUTOHOTKEY

I have an Autohotkey script always running, which does a bunch of different things. At the core is an autocorrect feature that corrects common spelling errors and typos taken from Wikipedia. It also will function as a text replacement utility (inserting, time, date, signatures etc…). Get it here.

Additionally, I remap some keys of the keyboard – such as Insert is now a minimise window key. 

I have some global hotkeys for launching/switching to frequently used applications (such as my favoured music player, 1plus1). They launch the app when its not loaded, switch to it when is it isn’t the active window, and minimises the app when it is the active window.

I have all my numpad button mapped (with right ctrl) to frequently used different applications.

I have a hotkey that takes the current select text and launches a google search.

I have hotkeys for controlling volume using an OSD.

Because I use a ancient buckling spring keyboard, I have my right alt button mapped to the windows key.

I also tend to create hotkeys on the fly for specific functions, essentially macros that replay certain key combinations.

Window Management – WINSPLIT REVOLUTION

A must for window management on large screens and multiple monitors. Hotkeys for moving windows and resizing round the screen in arrangements of your choosing, and I also have a hotkey for sending a window to another monitor.

Desktop management – DEXPOT

Dexpot is extremely German, and extremely good. I have four desktops, each with a different label (work, play, analysis, writing) and desktop wallpaper. I have hotkeys setup so that I can easily switch between them and send applications to each window. A minor plus is that it also adds a context menu, which allows you to set windows to be "always on top" which can be handy.

Office suite – MICROSOFT OFFICE

The only pay for software on this list. If you are on Windows and you don’t have to pay for it, then you don’t have much choice.

Text editing – Notepad2

I have this set up to replace notepad and be the default text editor. It lets you zoom in and out. Which makes me happy.

Browsing – FIREFOX

Firefox is my browser of choice because of the extensibility it offers. Most useful (non cosmetic) extensions that I use are:

Zotero – reference manager/endnote killer

Foxmarks – synchronising bookmarks across machines

Adblock – blocks flashing things

Google Gears – to get offline gmail

Application launcher – SLICKRUN

I have talked about my love of Slickrun here. I have tried other, more fully featured programs, like Ubiquity in Firefox, but the simplicity and reliability of Slickrun keeps me coming back. I put it down to reliability – when I issue a command, it works, and I don’t have to think (or look and choose between the results of a search)

Fixing windows annoyances – Autohide, CCleaner.

Autohide mostly fixes problems with windows auto-hide taskbar settings, and CCleaner does cleans your computer every now and again.

Backup and sync – MS MESH

Microsoft Mesh is one of the tools that has transformed by computing experience. Back in the day I used to take my laptop to work everyday. No more. Mesh syncs selected folders to the “cloud” (the next big thing in computing, apparently) and allows for 5GB of data for free, which is enough for my needs. It syncs all files in any folders you specify across machines and also on Microsoft servers for backup.

It means I can work on a document on my laptop at home, and without being having to do anything I can turn up at my office and continue working on the same document where I left off. No more emailing myself documents, or storing to a flash disk. And it means in theory I should never ever loose data, as anything important is being continually backed with multiple redundancy.

I have a single folder on my local drive which I keep everything I could want to sync, and create ad hoc syncs for particular purposes.

Microsoft was also kind enough to throw in a very handful remote desktop tool for all your computers connected to the MESH, which saves having additional software for this purpose. It also allows for sharing, if you like sharing.

Powerpoint is ubiquitous in academic presentations, yet it is often roundly criticised. One of the major problems with powerpoint is that it focuses on form over content. Powerpoint is a what-you-see-is-what-you-get editor. This makes it easy to spend more time on the form than content, as if you start writing a presentation in powerpoint from scratch, the bells and whistles can easily be distracting, and rather than writing your presentation you can end up spending hours tweaking fonts. Powerpoint can help, however, in structuring a talk. Much of this structuring ability comes from the use of powerpoint essentially as an outlining tool. Indeed, powerpoint has an outline tool built in. However, what I recommend is not to use the inbuilt outlining tool, because it is very hard to resist playing round with the formatting. You need to separate form from content completely.

Instead, use a different tool for outlining. Chances are, if you use powerpoint, you also use word, which has a reasonable outlining feature. Go into outline view on word, switch off “show text formatting”, and write your outline using level headings. I use the ctrl-alt-1/2/3/4 keyboard shortcuts to create headings and indents.

When done, save as a normal word file, and open in powerpoint. Powerpoint will make every first level heading the title of a slide, and lower level headings will be converted to bullet points within slides.  You will need to add graphics at this stage, as importing pictures from word to powerpoint doesn’t work. I use figure names in the outline to remind me what figures I need to insert. Your pictures should come last, as like formatting, it is easy to waste time looking for clipart when you should be focusing on your content.

So once you have your content sorted, now it is time to worry about its presentation. You can then apply one of the inbuilt templates. Alternatively, for greater control and your own unique style, go to the view menu and choose Slide Master. Change the formatting of the top level slide master (choose your colour scheme, fonts, background etc…) and then all your slides will be automatically updated. You can also edit of the existing layouts or add your own. For example, I sometimes use slides with just a single line of text in the middle, so I create a new master for title page for this and name it “single title”. Then, I go back to the slide view and change the layout for particular slides to new slide master layouts I have created.

Using slide masters is key to control over visual presentation in powerpoint and becoming a power user. Rather than going through slides and making individual changes, you can make global changes that affect all slides. And if you create a slide master you like, it is worth saving them as a powerpoint template to the form the basis of future presentations.

For some inspiration and 10 top tips on good powerpoint design, see Garr Reynolds.

One thing to note is that with what some consider really good powerpoint design, the pictures can be more important than the text, and therefore you might want to build your powerpoint around visual points instead of a text outline. But I don’t think that type of style of presentation works for so well for the technical and specialist talks that academics typically give. Maybe you can pull it off. As always, you have to consider your content, your audience, and the message you want to communicate.

I better stop posting now and finish outlining the presentation I was working on before writing this post…

]]> http://www.academicproductivity.com/2009/stop-powerpointing-and-start-outlining/feed/ 13 http://www.academicproductivity.com/2008/tools-for-online-academic-collaboration/ http://www.academicproductivity.com/2008/tools-for-online-academic-collaboration/#comments Thu, 11 Sep 2008 09:43:32 +0000 shane http://www.academicproductivity.com/?p=391 A reader writes: “Dear Academic Productivity, After having finished a phd project, I am starting a new research project together with a colleague. As a collaborative project requires, well, collaboration and coordination, I wonder if you or perhaps your readers happen to have any good advice, both on best practices and concrete suggestions for web-based [...]]]>

A reader writes:

“Dear Academic Productivity,

After having finished a phd project, I am starting a new research project together with a colleague. As a collaborative project requires, well, collaboration and coordination, I wonder if you or perhaps your readers happen to have any good advice, both on best practices and concrete suggestions for web-based collaboration tools.
Some examples of our needs:
* As we’re studying public policy change, the bulk of our empirical material consists of various sorts of text documents (official reports,  government bills, parliamentary minutes, media reports, interview transcripts etc.), some of which are available online. I figure we need a searchable database just to keep track of it all; ideally, it should allow us to archive and annotate full-text documents.
* …or even more ideally: a web-based CAQDAS package. Are there any?
* Reference management: Awaiting an online collaboration version of Zotero, what’s the best way of managing references?
* …and/or sharing reading notes and lit reviews? Now we’re just pouring our reading notes into a blog, which is not an optimal solution.
I’m aware of the basic options available (blogs, wikis, project management software etc), but as they are all aimed for other purposes than research, I’m curious to know what tools and practices other researchers actually use.”

For those not in the know (i.e. myself we recevied this email), CAQDAS is an acronym for “Computer Assisted Qualitative Data Analysis Software,” which can be used to search, organize, categorise, and annotate textual and visual data.

I have asked others the same question as Mr A. Reader, and as of yet I have not found a single tool that captures the needs of academic research groups. I also haven’t encountered any academic research groups that make comprehensive use of  online tools, so I would be interested to hear from our readers in the comments.  

One tool that might fit the bill is wikindx. It allows shared references and annotations and uploading of documents, though you would need to host your own server for its database. New kid on the block is Mendeley, which we should be reviewing soon. It creates a searchable index of your PDF documents, extracts references from them, and has an online shareable reference management system as well. In the above case, if you converted all your supporting documents to PDF it might fit part of the bill.

I was recently involved in a project where I needed to examine some research literature on learning and memory. In particular, I was investigating the spaced learning effect on memory. Memory research has been central to psychology for as long as  psychology has existed as an academic discipline, and the spacing effect (also known as distributed practice) has been studied for well over an hundred years. Studies of the spacing effect have shown that when you space learning over separate learning intervals, long term retention is normally much higher compared with the equivalent amount of training from a single or “massed” session. This effect is robust across different time scales, different kinds of learning, and is even true across different species. Another effect, not quite as well studied, is the testing effect. Repeated testing over time is also beneficial for learning, mainly because testing involves effortful memory retrieval, which is advantageous for the formation of long term memories.

Spaced learning (and testing) is to be recommended for the autodictact, but the purpose of this post is not to espouse the virtues of this method of learning, Instead, my main aim here is to have a moan about the non application of this method in education. Most textbooks make use of the repeated testing technique, by the use of quiz sections at the end of each chapter. But it is still relatively rare to make use of spaced testing, where material from previous chapters is also included in an end of chapter test. In higher education institutions (though I speak mainly from experience of the British system), the typical format for teaching is for students to be taught in a single semester, where each week a new topic is introduced, and the course is assessed by a single essay or exam at the end of the course. This design encourages the cramming technique, beloved of procrastinators, where vast chunks of the course syllabus are memorised in a mammoth session the night (and morning) before an exam. This is a valid strategy for investing the minimum amount of time to reap the maximum reward in marks attained, but is a poor technique to maximise long term retention. Of course, conscientious students can use spaced learning techniques. And by their very nature, some disciplines more than others require a form of spaced learning and recall. For example, higher maths involves recall and use of basic maths, whereas the recall of Shakespearean plays is typically not essential in the study of Dickens.

Though there are an many exceptions, it seems that an important part of the design of educational systems is that of convenience. The business of education, is increasingly, a business. The easiest way of administering courses is by the single semester, single assessment model. It means less marking, and less time spent running a course. This makes it popular with academics, and with most students too. Students can learn the material for a course, get the grade, and then forget about it, knowing they will not be tested again. However, if one were serious about taking the spacing effect seriously, then one might design courses that spanned several years, with testing throughout those years. However, I can’t palm off all the blame onto educationalists and academics taking the easy route. Part of the problem lies in the difficulty in applying cognitive psychology to education. Cognitive psychological research typically has not provided the kind of robust evidence for benefits that allows educationalists to take such principles as spaced learning for fact, and worth the effort to implement. In the instance of spaced learning, a research group led by Hal Pashler have undertaken research that straddles the theoretical and applied research border, and are pushing for adoption for the application of spaced learning in pedagogical contexts. A short summary of their work can be found here, which provides further information and some references.

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From why that’s delightful, via omnibrain.

Having recently completed a PhD, I will share with you three indispensable nuggets of advice for how to get the monster vanquished: use hard deadlines, soft deadlines, and the Martini Method. With a small amount of imagination these can be applied to any large project.

Perhaps the most important determiner when a PhD gets finished is the HARD DEADLINE. While hard deadlines are supremely important, giving advice to have one is somewhat pointless, since they are also a factor that you have little or no control over. The main hard deadline is that which your institution has determined your maximum amount of time allowable for completion of your PhD. At my institution, this was four years. And without fail, graduate students would be frantically printing their thesis the day before this deadline for binding and submission. Other frequent constraining deadlines are when your money runs out, or the start of a new job. While these aren’t quite as constraining as the ultimate deadline, life can be made considerably difficult if you are left with writing your PhD when starting a new job, or when you cannot afford to pay your rent. As any normal human being knows, deadlines are important for many reasons. One of which is Parkinson’s law: which stipulates that the time you take to complete a task is strongly determined by the time you have to complete that task.

Deadlines which you have more control over are SOFT DEADLINES. These are those deadlines which you determine yourself. One advantage over hard deadlines is that you can choose how many of them and when they occur. The disadvantage is that the consequences of failing to meet them are usually not severe, and can be safely ignored. One solution to their softness is to create real consequences from deadlines. The method of doing this will depend on your personality, and whether you are best driven by the carrot or the stick. Perhaps the most common method in a PhD is externalisation of the deadlines by forming a contract with your supervisor. Many supervisors will set deadlines to their students, but if you do not have a supervisor that does this I would urge you to engage your supervisor in the process of setting soft deadlines. I had an arrangement in the later stages of writing up my thesis to have a piece of work for him to read every week or second week (depending on the size of the work), which helped immensely. You may not like these deadlines, but I believe they are essential, following Parkinson’s law, amongst other reasons.

What I call the Martini Method is named after an anecdote I once read about the novelist Anthony Burgess (of Clockwork Orange fame). Burgess was a very productive writer, which is attributed to a system where he would force himself to write a 1000 words a day, 365 days a year. When he had completed his word count, he would relax with a dry martini, and enjoy the rest of the day with an easy conscience, and normally in bar. A friend of mine’s version of the Martini Method was to come into the office everyday, and not allow herself to leave until her word target had been reached. Most days she left before 5pm, though on occasion she would stay as late as 6 or 7. She would also set herself mini Martinis, such as allowing herself an ice cream in the summer once she had hit half her daily word count. Though we started at the same time, she finished her PhD a lot earlier than me!

A PhD is a huge project, which has to be largely self managed, and its size can lead to anxiety which leads to procrastination as a coping mechanism. If you spend a few days without working on your PhD, anxiety or guilt can build up, which consequently make it even harder to get started, and days can easily turn into weeks without meaningful work being undertaken. The Martini method also encapsulates the well known idea that a large project needs to be split up into small chunks, and quantifies those chunks into specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and time bound goals (what management books call a SMART objective).

The Martini Method works by the carrot, which personality psychologists have generally have found to be more effective than the stick. 1000 words is an arbitrary number, and you might find it too much or two little, but I think that somewhere between 500-1000 to be optimal. Writing a 1000 words a day doesn’t take into reviewing and editing time. What I used to do was to start the day with the editing of the text written on the previous day. This makes for an easier way to get started, as editing existing text is less cognitively daunting than starting afresh, and warms up the mind for the writing to come.

The new version of MS word makes word counting much easier – when you select text it shows you the word count at the bottom. One tool that can be used to stick to a daily habit is the chain method. The comedian Jerry Seinfeld marks a cross on his calendar every day, and aims to create an unbroken chain of crosses. Online daily goal tracker and habit maker Joes Goals now implements the chain method, which could be used instead of a paper calendar if you are that way inclined.

Tags: deadlines – phd – burgess – martini method – parkinson’s law – time management

I have been using Microsoft Word for 12 years, but having just written a 75,000 word document, I feel I am just starting to learn how to use it properly. MS WORD is open to abuse and I guess that many, if not most, of its users don’t get the most out of the program. In this article I share some tips for non-expert MS WORD users that have garnered from my recent experiences of WORD.

In previous posts on this blog we have advocated the use of the LaTex software. A real type setting program such as LaTex has many advantages. A sustained argument against WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) word processors like WORD can be found here, and an ode to LaTeX by our very own Dario here. In terms of the actual writing of an academic article, a type setting program allows you to concentrate on content and structure, whereas with MS WORD you can easily find new methods of procrastination by trying out different fonts for headings, and get sidetracked from the real business of writing. However, LaTeX is popular with a particular audience, particularly those who are fond of UNIX and the command line, such as those in the engineering and computing fields. For less technically savvy users, LaTex is probably not an option, and MS WORD is all they know. If you stuck with MS WORD, you need to exert a little effort to use it properly and make your life easier, especially when you are writing a large academic document.

There are lots of guides to using MS WORD on the internet. Below I list the things I have learnt which I have found most useful. Another short useful guide I found is Ten things every Microsoft Word user should know 12. If you are completely unfamiliar with styles, find a tutorial on the internet that will go over the basics in more detail. This guide to styles might be a good place to start.

STYLES

The single most important piece of advice to use MS WORD sensibly is to use styles. One of the big advantages of Latex is that is it forces to properly format your documents. With MS WORD you have the option to be chaotic in your use of formatting. Styles creates order, and discipline.

1. Think about what your main styles are going to be in your document. The styles you use will depend on the formatting conventions in your field. My basic set includes 4 levels of headings, default paragraph, first paragraph of section, table text, indented quotes, and table/figure titles.
2. Don’t click the “automatically update” option in the modify styles menu box. It might sound fun, but it is bad news. It means that whenever you change the formatting of the text in your document, it will update your style.
3. If you want to change the formatting of text in your document, modify the style, not your text.
4. Don’t use the style Normal in your document. Use Body instead for normal text, i.e. Your default paragraph text. The Normal style is the template that most other styles are based on. It is sacred. If you want to make global changes to your document, such as the font, you should modify your Normal font, and all the other styles, which are based on normal, will follow suit.
5. WORD has a number of tools and menus for working with styles easier. My most used one is apply styles box, which appears if you press ctrl+shift+s, and you can then type in the name of our font (using autocomplete), and hit enter to change the current paragraph.
6. The apply styles box will also show you the style name of the current paragraph, and then you can click “Modify” to change the style.
7. My Body style has first line indenting, while I have a separate Body First style for the first paragraph has no indentation. I have it set so that the text following my headings defaults to Body First, while the text following Body First defaults to Body. This way I never have to use the tab key.
8. When pasting into your document, do not use “keep source formatting” option, as you will introduce junk styles into your document.
9. If you want to be really strict about your use of styles, you can use the protect document option to limit the styles you can use in your document to a chosen to few. This isn’t a bad idea, as it forces you to use style discipline. For example, if you wanted to italicise a word, you couldn’t just press ctrl-i. Instead you would have to change the style (e.g. Style Emphasis), though this is probably a little extreme for most people.

   TABLES & FIGURES

10. When you want to insert a title for a figure/table, use the insert caption option.
11. If you do this, creating a list of figures/tables for your document is a breeze.
12. When referring to your table/figure in your text, use the cross reference option. Choose the reference type as table/figure, change the “Insert reference to” selection to “Only label and number” and WORD will insert in your text as Table 1/Figure 1 etc…
13. To update all the references in your document (including table of contents etc), select all text (shortcut: ctrl+a) and fit F9 to update.
14. Change your caption style with the paragraphing option (Line and page breaks tab) “keep with next”, which will stop the title from being split across pages from its matching table/figure.
15. With tables, you need to additionally right click the table properties, choose the row tab, and uncheck the “Allow row to break across pages” checkbox.

    VIEWING YOUR DOCUMENT

16. Proof reading is best done with a hard copy. However, when reading on screen, its best to use full screen mode (shortcut: Alt,v,u) and then adjust font size by using ctrl+mouse wheel so that the font is nice and large. I much prefer this to the new screen reading option in WORD 2007. This is very good for removing distractions so you can just focus on your document.
17. With large documents, the document map can be useful. You can change the font size with the ctrl+mouse wheel option, and narrow the width so that it is not obtrusive.

    HEADINGS

18. The default heading styles in WORD are a little funky. Change them to something that suits you.
19. If you want to use numbered headings, they can be a pain to implement. I ended up finding a WORD document template for numbering on the internet that I used as the basis for my heading styles due to the infuriating way in which WORD deals with numbering.
20. To make headings easier to apply, WORD has some shortcut keys ctrl-alt+1 for heading 1, and so forth. It only goes up to heading 3 I believe, so I have set up additional shortcut keys for level 4 and 5 headings.
21. Use of proper headings allows proper use of the Outline mode.
22. Using the cross reference method described above tables & figures can also be used for headings, as you insert the heading number. Then you write in your text, “as shown in Section X….” and the Section X number will automatically update even if the heading number changes later in your writing.

    SPELLING & GRAMMAR

23. I used to have the highlight grammar option switched off. I believe it is improved in Word 2007, and now I find about 70% of its advice useful. You can customize it to ignore some of its pet peeves, such as the use of passive sentences.

    NOTES

24. With the use of keyboard shortcuts, notes can be very useful and convenient to add. For example, I am often removing sentences or references from my main text and adding them as notes instead.
25. Use a shortcut key for adding new notes (I use ctrl+alt+n).
26. I have a shortcut key to get hide/show the notes pane, as when you add a note it will automatically bring up the notes pane, which I prefer to have hidden from view when in writing mode.
27. I also have a macro set up to add a new note, paste the contents of the clipboard, and then close the notes panel.
28. I also have a bunch of ideas stored at the bottom of the WORD document, text which I may incorporate into the main body of the document later and “things to do”, which I navigate to using the ctrl+End shortcut.

29. FIND & REPLACE

30. Ctrl+Up and Ctrl-Down will navigate to the last searched text, either up or down your document.
31. Find is very useful for finding text in a document, obviously. When correcting a proof, you can search for a few words close to where you need to make a correction, to quickly find the text you need to correct.
32. Find and replace is a powerful tool, especially when you understand how to use the advanced syntax and wildcards, but be careful when using Find and Replace. Check it after making large changes. For example, I capitalised all the incidences of the word table in my text, and ended up with changes such as noTable, which would have been easily avoided if I had been more careful in my search term (e.g. ” table ” instead of “table”.)
33. Another tip in being careful is to use the Match Case option. For example, if you realise you have made a consistent spelling error in your document, first correct it using lower case find and replace (e.g. find “thier”, replace “their”, and then correct those cases where the word starts the beginning of a sentence: find “Thier” replace with “There”).
34. Use ^W^W in find and replace with ^W double whitespace characters. Keep doing this till none are left.
35. Use the same technique to remove double lines with find ^P^P, replace with ^P
36. Use the Highlight All option to give you a count of many search items found. This is useful for picking up overuse of certain words. We all have our favourite words that get tired when overused. For example, I found about 30 uses of the word “investigate” in my document. I went through a changed a bunch to examine, look into, explore etc…

     

    Technorati Tags: microsoft word – word – styles –

This post is an ode to Google Scholar (GS). GS has a major advantage against expensive institution only academic search engines in that is free, which makes services indispensable to independent scholars wishing to get some access to research literature when they don’t have an institutional subscription. However, even though I personally have institutional access to indexing services like Web of Science and Scopus, I still prefer GS for the majority of my searches, and in this post I will explain why.

GS is not alone if offering free academic article indexing for a wide range of sources. This post lists a bunch of free and paid services. Microsoft live academic has a very similar system, using a slick interface, which has the advantage of providing paper abstracts where available upfront, and before both these appeared, Citesteer provided something similar. I prefer GS over these and other systems I have tried. In my limited testing, I found the MS live search and Citesteer to give a much smaller set of results to GS. For ease and speed of use I prefer the simplicity of the Google design over the paid alternatives.

GS is largely disliked by librarians, as Google is very cagey about what there index consists and their citation index is probably not to be trusted for serious reporting. GS gives citation counts, which might not always be exactly accurate, for most purposes an exact total isn’t necessary, as it serves as good measure of the importance and influence of a book or paper, and allows easy access to those references that cite it. By default, when you click to see articles that cite a particular article, the index is presented with the most highly cited articles first, which makes it very easy to see the important and influential articles in a field.

As Jose suggested in a previous post, one way to assess the productivitveness of reference managers is by how many clicks it takes to get what you want. GS is about as productive in this regard as I could imagine any reference indexer to be. Because it is free, there is no login and you don’t have to be on a university network to access search results or enter in passwords, or have your session time out like some other services. This means GS is always available. If you set up the preferences on GS you can setup a link to your reference manager of choice for an instant export. As I now use Zotero, this means it’s a one click operation to get a reference into my database, with no dialog prompts.

GS has the advantage that it often indexes PDF’s for the article, which may not be available by other means. If there is a link for your search result of “View as HTML” you know the link GS provides is for the PDF, otherwise it normally links to the abstract via various publishers websites or other indexing services. If there is a link at the side “all X versions”, this means there are various other places in which that article is indexed. If that X is a high number, it is likely that one of the other links will be the PDF, which is useful to check if the frontpage GS link doesn’t link to a PDF, or if the PDF that GS links to is missing. If the reference is a book, it will often link to the Google Book site entry for that book, which is handy.

For easier access to full text articles which GS doesn’t index, I use the OpenURL referrer firefox extension, which can work out your OpenURL referrer for your institution, and adds a link to GS search results. Google offers this service itself for many American libraries – just check the GS preferences page. If you click the link this service adds, it will use the OpenURL system to work out if your library has access to the full text version of the article on the publishers website or other indexing service, and take you to it. It also should show if you have the reference in your library.

One advantage and disadvantage of GS is that it includes many articles that wouldn’t get included in other indexing services. One nice advantage is that it gives you access to books and articles in a single search. The articles GS indexes includes manuscripts in preparation and working papers. This means you can access articles not accessible by other means. However, this means you don’t get the benefits of peer review, but I think the benefits of getting recent papers outweighs this disadvantage. Another problem is that GS will sometimes export reference data which isn’t properly formatted, or missing fields. This will unsurprisingly occur for unpublished papers, but for regular papers it doesn’t happen regularly enough to be a major problem for me. GS gives the index source underneath the link to the reference, so you can figure out whether the exported reference will have the full information, and you can check other sources if GS shows them to be available.

While GS is useful for the reasons outlined above, the best feature of GS is the search. GS uses the Google simplicity of search principle. There is a just one search box, with no fields. There is a link to an advanced search field which allows you to limit searches by year, by publication, and author. This may seem very limited compared to other services. For further information on these options see the GS help page. However, with GS I don’t use advanced searches, apart from the occasion “author:”, as the power of GS is that you don’t need to. I typically put a few uncommon words from the title and the most uncommon author name, and the vast majority of the time I get what I am looking for. One feature of Google search syntax that you might not know is that if you string words together by dashes it is equivalent to a search string. e.g. “war is peace” is the same as war-is-peace. Doing this for a few words from the title of the reference you are looking for ensures a high success rate.

The ease and speed of searching is enhanced for me with other tools that make instant search easier. I use a keyboard launcher, Slickrun, which means I can execute searches from a command line accessible via a hotkey. Other keyboard launchers can provide a similar service, or you can use the keyword feature of Firefox. The means that whenever I see a reference, such as in a PDF article, I copy the reference, type my GS keyword, paste the search term, and a second later my GS search term is loading. An alternative method is to use the firefox extension Conquery . This means I can select text in the browser (e.g. name of an article) and send the text as a search term to google scholar. I also have an AutoHotKey command which will instantly launch selected text as a GS search.

The speed and ease of which I can access to references has changed the way I work. Its quicker for me to get a reference via a GS search then it is to find a stored copy in my own reference manager, and I can’t ask for much more that that from a reference indexing service.

Technorati Tags: reference management – references – Google Scholar – reference indexing

I am PC bound, but my MAC jealously was aroused when I spied a new freeware app  “skim”:

Skim is a PDF reading and note-taking app for Mac OS X that is designed to make reading research papers and manuals better. Just like in Preview, you can search, scan, and zoom through PDFs, but you also get some custom features for your workflow…

I read about it on this blog.

Technorati Tags: skim – pdf – pdf management – pdf reader

Psychologist Henry L. Roediger III gives some excellent advice for reviewing journals papers (two word summary: be nice!). Though a psychologist, his twelve tips should have applicability for all academic disciplines. An excerpt from his introduction follows:

Many critical skills needed for becoming a successful academic are typically not taught in graduate school, at least not in any formal way. One of these is how to review journal articles. Few students coming out of graduate school have much experience reviewing papers, and yet, at least for those students continuing on in research, reviewing is a skill that will be increasingly critical as their careers develop. In fact, being a good reviewer can greatly help a career. If a young psychologist becomes known as an excellent reviewer, he or she may be selected as consulting editor, then associate editor, and then perhaps the primary editor of a journal.