Academic Productivity

My typical day can be divided roughly into thirds: part administration, part analysis/thinking, and part reading. And while I like the new ideas that come with reading, it can be awfully tedious at times. Who wants to spend all day plowing through a big stack of papers and books, especially now that it’s summer? So while this title may be a bit jokey, I’m going to share some serious tips for how to speed up your reading of the most time-consuming materials: books.

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WordFlashReader has several advantages over the previously analyzed rapidReader: it’s open source, and written in perl. So it works under linux and windows at least. wordflashreader also highlights where you are reading, so one of the downsides of RSVP (disorientation) is mostly gone. Still, you lose the formatting when you read HTML or PDF… and the highlighting didn’t work very well for me. The way cursors change speed make it confusing (I’m too used to move around the document with cursor keys). One nifty idea is to go back one sentence with left control key.

As before, of you can test it out and post your thoughts for everyone to see, that’d be great.

Another option we commented before was spreeder.

I’m still looking for the holy Grail that makes my reading more fluid and effective. It looks like this is an interest that I share with many people according to the huge pile of books that amazon lists for ’speed reading’.

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This is big. Harvard University has a new policy: make your scholarly articles available free online.

As Slashdot commenter hawk describes it:

The academic publishing industry is a dinosaur in desperate need of elimination. It charges tens of thousands of dollars per school for journals that would be more useful as web sites–, not and available several months earlier. As it exists, journals are for the benefit of the publishing companies, not the world at large, academia, or the authors. The economic model is that the faculty write, are paid nothing, and the libraries pay huge fees to the publishing houses.
Will the publishers react to open up? I doubt it; they can’t.
The *real* result of this will be top articles going to online journals, which will first rival and then displace the printed journals. This is a good thing for everyone except the publishing houses.

But what’s in it for me, the end user of the paper? First, faster review cycles. Second, my ideas will reach a wider target (those who are not affiliated with a powerful library and cannot access them otherwise). Third, the ideas will get there faster. Forget about the close to a year delay between accepted and printed. Seeing “In press” in the reference list may be a thing of the pass soon. Fourth, if everything is online (imagine a journal article with a ‘comments’ section, open to anyone), then soft peer review is even easier and more transparent.

Nothing of this should be news, most people have their articles online anyway… but it sometimes breaks the agreement you have with the paper journal. Now that a large university makes this practice a policy, we’ll see other universities follow up soon.

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Mark McGuinness has collected a bunch of his best post into one free ebook. It works well as an overview of what is ‘common practices’ in time management nowadays.

He also posted some more resources here.

» Time Management #8: Resources BoDo: Business of Design online » Blog Archive

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This is quite a finding; I’m still wondering how a paper that basically says: “academics are sluts” got accepted in a peer reviewed journal. Kudos to the editor.

Frey, B. S. (2002) Publishing as prostitution? – Choosing between one’s own ideas and academic success. Public choice, 116: 205-223

Here’s an excerpt:

The author knows that, normally, he would be lucky if, after something like a year or so, he gets an invitation to resubmit the paper according to the demands exactly spelled out by the two to three referees and the editor(s). For most scholars, this is a proposal that cannot be refused, because their survival in academia crucially depends on publications in refereed professional journals. They are well aware of the fact that they only have a chance to get the paper accepted if they slavishly follow the demands formulated. The system of journal editing existing in our field at the present time virtually forces academics to become prostitutes: they sell themselves for money (and a good living). Unlike prostitutes who sell their bodies for money (Edlund and Korn, 2002), academics sell their soul to conform to the will of others, the referees and editors, in order to gain one advantage, namely publication. Most persons
refusing to prostitute themselves and to follow the demands of the system are not academics: they cannot enter, or have to leave, academia because they fail to publish. Their integrity survives, but the persons disappear as academics.

Surprising as the title might be, the paper actually proposes yet another solution to the peer-review conundrum. It’s a system that pretty much everybody agrees is broken but nobody has been able to fix.

The solution: remove the veto powers from the reviewers. Use the editor’s feeling as the only criterion. Why? Because the editor is the only one who knows how the paper fares relative to other submissions to the journal, whereas the reviewers have to use “according to some mystical absolute standards rather than be able to select the relatively best paper from those submitted.”

PS: This paper has the longest acknowledgments list I’ve ever seen. It must have been hell to get it published

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We have posted before about speed reading. Note that this term encompasses many different methods, some of which are based on dubious claims (see wikipedia article). The method I’m talking about is rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP), i.e., saving time by avoiding saccadic movements. I really didn’t get much use of it, because when I tried it I found the interaction with my favorite program too cumbersome.

However, I still think that the idea or RSVP holds a lot of promise. I have found a better program, called rapidReader6. It has a 30-day demo. It solves many of the problems that this technique has, although not all.

Instead of listing my impressions, I’d like to see yours. Can I ask you to download the trial, and read one paper with it (try to make it from the beginning to the end)? You will find many shortcomings, but please keep going, and post them here so we can discuss them. Did you read the article faster than before? What made you lose focus?

For example, the fact that formatting is lost (Am I reading a heading, or a footnote?), and that figures and equations are lost (damn, I have to go back to the original document!) is troublesome. Sometimes, when reading a pdf, it picks header and footer as main text. One trick: convert from pdf to word (adobe acrobat does that) and then point rapidReader to the word doc; it usually fixes it).

I’m really interested in knowing what your impressions are.

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This is another nifty trick that makes me think faster and feel more “in the flow”. If you look at what a person does when reading or writing a document, a good chunk of the time she is just trying to reposition the cursor, or otherwise move around.

Did you know that you can change the speed the cursor moves around in the screen? Well, not directly from the OS interface (at least in windows). But you certainty can using a little autoHotKey program called fastNavKeys from Skrommel.

This program runs in the tray, and will let you change the buffer time for keypresses; it can get ridiculously fast. It’s very good to scroll rapidly to the line you need to see/edit. Very handy when reading pdfs or editing manuscripts, and of course programming. Just try it and you will see how much faster you can make the cursor move. You can of course change the speed of other keys, such as delete.

I never thought possible how much better one can *think* by just having faster navigation keys.

Note: it’s addictive. If you are stranded using a computer that doesn have fastNavKeys it’ll feel as if everything is slow motion around you.

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Disclaimer: this post may be relevant only for social sciences/psychology people. I found a nice thread on the Judgment and decision making (JDM) mailing list on the need for replications.

Lots of good posts on an interesting discussion. The mainstream view is that we simply don’t run enough replications because they are harder to get published. This leads to studies showing that replications are actually very hard, with only a small percentage (about 40% in the social sciences) being successful.  Robyn Dawes seems to thing that replications are overrated:

the “real” scientists do is to futch around until they get it “right.” The multiple study requirement just adds “first and second and third” studies, thereby wasting space and time.

There are comments on Increasing the Percentage of Papers Replicated, and some nice book recommendations on experimenter bias.

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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

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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 these programs!

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There is a nice pdf reader comparison  at donationcoder.com. Since most academics rely on pdf quite a lot, choosing the right tool may save a lot of time and frustration.

The idea here is to have a tool that opens up as fast as possible, uses as little memory as possible, and lets you move around the pdf conveniently with the best rendering quality.

Some of the tools are obscure (great finds!). Most of them are tiny compared to the standard Adobe Reader, but do suffer quality- and feature-wise.

Adobe Reader 8 has the nicest quality of text, it is beautifully crisp; but even with the speed increase of version 8, the program is still something of a monster.

Foxit is very well known as the freeware alternative, it is not the smallest application of those tested, but it does use the least memory; however, the quality of its output is by far the worst!

Adobe’s new comer Digital Edition is still in beta, and has some annoyances (no custom install, all files added to library) but it is a fraction of the size of its big brother. Sadly the render quality does suffer; though not as poor as Foxit all the other applications tested produced more legible text.

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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.

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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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How much time do academics waste chasing down references and managing them right now? The ceremony of fishing, saving, organizing and inserting references may be taking a significant percentage in any academic’s time allocation table.

James Howison & Abby Goodrum make a very good point about how little use we currently make of metadata. Why music and images gets tagged, but not academic papers? It seems that you can do a search by artist name easily, but not by author name when using pdfs (not natively at least)In my case, I try to make up a filename that contains all the key terms, author names, etc that I anticipate I may need. Then, I index the filenames only (not the full text) using a desktop search program (locate 3.0).  This is definitely a lot worse than the way my music is organized my music and I didn’t dedicate much time to it since it already came tagged or was easily mass-tagged using a program that talks to amazon or CDDB.  I wonder how we got to the point that even after  dedicating ten  more times more resources to organizing references than music they are still harder to find and handle.

Howison ventures to say that the experience of managing mp3s is far more fluid than managing any other documents, certainly more than managing pictures, word documents, and of course, academic papers in PDF form. This is just because music files have embedded metadata that travel with the media, while academic papers don’t.

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I just found an excellent paper:

BIAS AND ACCURACY IN ESTIMATES OF TASK DURATION

Author(s): JOSEPHS RA, HAHN ED

Source: ORGANIZATIONAL BEHAVIOR AND HUMAN DECISION PROCESSES 61 (2): 202-213 FEB 1995

From the abstract:

When asked to estimate the duration of various academic-type tasks (e.g., the time needed to complete a writing assignment, solve a series of problems, or read a manuscript), subjects demonstrated a marked tendency to trade accuracy in favor of minimizing cognitive effort in their selection of planning strategies. This tendency resulted in a drastic underestimation of the time required to complete the task.

This might be well known for all academics (most people I know underestimate time needed to complete an assignment).

Reading estimates are particularly bad, and this could easily be solved by tracking (automatically) how long it takes you to read each article (extremely easy if you read them off the screen).

It seems that improving your estimation skills can take you a long way. Currently I’m trying to construct a todo list with all steps that a project needs till completion (using the granularity ideas previously mentioned, and the program toDoList with time estimation visible next to each task). Hopefully I won’t be late for my next deadline, which is in 15 days!

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I posted here about some advantages of reading papers off the screen. However, most people find the very thought of reading off the screen almost unconceivable. In this post I’ll try to show some usability tricks that will help you make the transition (or at least give it a try!).

Part of what I’m going to use here is obtained with the help of an scripting language. called AutoHotkey (AHK). This is probably one of the most useful things you can install in a windows machine.

I’m using the 30-day trial of adobe acrobat 8, but all the tricks and keyboard shortcuts should work on acrobat 7 as well.

an example of how the window looks after pressing F8 and F9 to remove taskbars

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This topic will be retaken here at ap.com often. For a start, here is a quick post on advantages of reading pdfs off the screen

You can do searches. Do you know where the paragraph you are looking for is? If you remember a word, you can find it easily.

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Some programs out there offer you the possibility of reading faster by avoiding eye movements and backtracking. The two most popular ones (web-based) are spreeder and  ZAP Reader.

Some links on the technology:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rapid_Serial_Visual_Presentat…
http://news.com.com/2100-1046_3-5785579.html
http://www.buddybuzz.net/rel/Web/index.html

The experience is jarring (as if reading online wasn’t hard enough on the eyes), but it does seem to decrease reading delays. Looks like spreeder’s also working on a login so you can track your speedreading progress.

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