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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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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Have you used wikis as a mean of collaborative work with colleagues? Have you been frustrated by the current implementation, thinking that some ideas are just hard to put into wiki format? Gerhard Fischer, at the University of colorado, Boulder, has received a grant to improve existing wiki technologies for academic use. From the article:

The proposed research will create environments that go beyond existing Wikis (being primarily focused on hypertext) to permit the integration (not just attachment) of other forms of media ranging from movies and animations, to sharing of datasets, to the creation and utilization of social network information to support community interaction, to conceptual mind-mapping media.

I’m really interested in how several researchers collaborate on the same topic. Currently, most people I know simply email back and forth a word document with ‘track changes’ enabled (which can get messy after a few iterations). Not many people write papers using a ‘wikified’ document, and this could partly be just because hypertext (and all the symplified wiki markup languages) are not appropriate for the task. I wonder if the new additions would change current practices much (I’m really curious about the integrated mindmapping part).

Link to O’Reilly Radar > NSF Looking for a Better Wiki

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One of the good (potentially great) things about on-line reference sites  is that it can put you in touch with those academics who share interests with you. This particulary true with CiteULike, which by design encourages co-operation, for example, it allows you to see who else shares a reference in your library.

The link belows is a tool which works out which users share the most articles in your CiteULike collection, and you can then cherry pick interesting articles from their collections.

I first found this on the shadow blog, who turned out to one of my neighbours!

The link is here:

Technorati Tags: citeulike - social networking - reference management

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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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According to a definition wikipedia, RSS stands for “Really Simple Syndication” and is “a simple XML-based system that allows users to subscribe to their favorite websites. Using RSS, webmasters can put their content into a standardized format, which can be viewed and organized through RSS-aware software or automatically conveyed as new content on another website.”

Basically, RSS pushes content to you, making it possible to be up-to-date in pages that change constantly. With RSS one saves the time of actually visiting the page and looking for changes, since we get an update only when there is one.Why is it important for academics? There are many uses of RSS in this context, but we will talk about two today

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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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The recent launch of Zotero has been deservedly causing a lot excitement in the world of academic techno early adopters. It shows early promise, and there seems to some serious support behind its development, with a full time developer working on it.

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"Write down everything" is one of the premises of most time-management systems (at least in GTD and DIT). The importance of the concept of "getting things out of your head" is obvious. As David Allen says, "your head is a good place to have ideas, but not to hold them".

This is great also because it it makes you conscious of what you what to do, protecting you from random factors. For example, if I write down ’mail pic to friends’ instead of jumping to that task in an impulse immediately after I have come up with it, I may be able to finish the task I was doing.

But writing everything down has at least one disadvantage: we need to stop doing whatever we are doing to actually find our trusted medium and write it!

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Slickrun is my favourite computer program. I know this because its one of the first things I install on a new PC, and if I am using a PC with it not installed I get increasing annoyed every time I hit my chosen shortcut key (Ctrl-Z, as quick as they come) and nothing happens. Its part of my motor memory. It is as integral to my computer experience as using a mouse.

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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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Agenda at once (AAO) is one more program to handled todo lists and calendar (known as personal information managers -PIMs-). The main difference is that in this one these two components are integrated and displayed simultaneously. You may be familiar with the day scheduler (yellow in the screenshot) if you have used outlook. The interesting thing about this program is that combines the hierarchical outliner (classical todo lists) with the calendar/scheduler view. You can drag and drop tasks from one to another, and that makes it easier to allocate times.

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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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This is a review of toDoList, a free, open source program to organize your tasks. It is very flexible and configurable and has replaced my main organized, a program that I believed suited me perfectly.
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