Academic Productivity

Maybe I’m getting out of touch, but it’s only now that I found sciencewatch. It’s a service of Thomson Reuters (the makers of Web of Science) that collects and displays statistics on recent trends in science. Example:

Aug 2008 – SCHOLARLY USE OF THE WORLD WIDE WEB – Research Front Map – ScienceWatch.com

This is a citation network that shows highly cited papers on WWW. Diameter relates to citation: the two bigger circles are the paper that proposed the Hirsch index, and King’s paper on the scientific impact of nations. Clicking on the circles provides details on the papers.

There are many other fronts:

• Fast Breaking papers. These papers comprise the top 1% of papers in each field and each year
• Top Topics selects the Research Fronts with the largest absolute increase in size in each of the 22 major fields covered by Essential Science Indicators

Worth keeping an eye on.

Frankly, there are too many reference managers today. This  is counterproductive because we all need to spend time checking the newcomers, just in case there’s a new feature that we were missing.

Most reference managers graft themselves to word or to openOffice. For example, Mendeley, and zotero both use internal reference functionality in word. In doing so, they use features that are available only on those editors. I think this is a big error for at least 3 reasons:

1. I draft my papers on a text editor or oneNote. This has a lot of advantages for me. But I would not be able to use say Mendeley or Zotero on oneNote; and I do want to keep references on my notetaking tool. Using a text editor has a lot of nice advantages over a word processor too, if you know how to use it.
2. It’s a lot faster to massage your reference the way you like it. It takes several clicks on zotero to get an Author (year, p. XX) reference. In endNote, it’d be a few keystrokes.
3. There are bottlenecks in our digital lives that are plain text. For example, emails, forum posts, and google docs are cases of writing that may need reference management but are ill-served by most current offerings. I want to copy-paste chunks of scientific writing and still carry my references; there’s life outside word processors, and quite a lot of it!

So what reference managers work ok on plain text. Well, here is the surprise: as far as I know, only bibTeX and endnote. This is surprising because they are the oldest. One would have thought that newcomers would have taken advantage of what these older tools learned.

Lurking in the Zotero forums, I saw people asking for support of this exact feature. But it seems that it’s never going to happen. It would take a lot of reengineering, and all users that are happy with the current solution (and have amassed a large body of authored docs) would complain.

so, where does this leave me? I need to either comply and write everything in word to take advantage of Mendeley and Zotero, or stick to oneNote, but use endNote references. Of course I could also do everything on a text editor and use bibTeX, but right now, it’s more trouble than it’s worth.

Does anyone know a good solution for my setting?

Exciting that an anonymous donor jumped in:

Donate to CHNM in June and your contribution will be matched twice over. Thanks to a challenge grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Center for History and New Media has the rare opportunity to build a $3 million endowment to support infrastructure expenses and ongoing development across its many projects. We’re delighted to announce that now your contribution to the Center for History and New Media will be matched for a limited time. If you give within the month of June your donation will be stretched even further since an anonymous donor has agreed to double the National Endowment for the Humanities matching funds.

If you or your institution used/still pays hundred of dollars per seat on other bibliography manager, consider donations of similar size. If you can raise awareness in your institution, please do so. Zotero is a project that benefits all (Open source) and has been legally attacked (in a childish way) by Thomson before.

Zotero Blog » Blog Archive » Help Zotero by Donating to the Center For History and New Media

It should be no surprise that many of us love Zotero, especially since they added support for reference sharing and synchronization.

I am probably the only exception in the AP team. As a longstanding MacTeX user, I keep my references organised with BibDesk, one of the sweetest pieces of (open source) software ever written for TeX users working on Mac OS. When hunting for references, I use CiteULike as a fast and effective solution to bookmark and tag papers. My workflow usually starts with an exploratory phase based on CiteULike. As soon as I have read a paper and need to cite it, I export its reference from CiteULike into BibDesk, filing the PDFs with the help of the autofile functionality in BibDesk. So far I have been quite happy with this workflow even if it involves a little bit of fiddling to correctly import references into my local library.

(more…)

The general agreement is that mail is broken. We all use it but kind of hate it too. Well, it seems that Google came up with a very good alternative (ambitious, and technically impressive): Google Wave.

A long video of Wave’s capabilities here.

It’s very long at 1:20hrs, but worth it. It’s peppered with random bouts of applause, something I’ve never seen in a scientific/technical presentation before. About minute 1:04, Lars Rasmussen presents real-time translation and he gets about a minute of standing ovation.

Why is this important for academics? Looks like sending a word document back and forth with version numbers in the file name is no fun. And setting a VCS with a bunch of .tex files plus figures is not much better (mainly because doing diffs on LaTeX files is pretty horrible). One could always convince a collaborator to use Google Docs, but then you have no way to use a proper reference manager, figures are a mess, etc. In short, scientific paper collaboration is not really pleasant right now.

(more…)