Following Journals

Female Science Professor recently [recently: in grad student time] had a post on keeping up with journal reading where she discussed the challenges of a cluttered email inbox and staying current with publications. I appreciated the comment section as much as the posts itself for the opportunity to learn how others stay afloat with new publications.

I follow academic journals and other publications via RSS feed in Google Reader. This system works for me as I have journals filed together by broad topics that are relevant to my current work (e.g., child maltreatment, culture and identity, child development, etc.). I also subscribe to research journals outside my discipline (e.g., criminology, public health, neuroscience) and this has been a helpful way to become familiar with work in related fields.  My morning routine usually includes scanning Reader which helps me stay afloat with subscriptions [and stay somewhat current with life outside of grad school].

Many of the FSP commenters also have subscriptions to PubMed search terms which seems incredibly helpful and will be my next keeping-up-with-journals experiment.

Beyond academic journals I also follow Research Blogging, Futurity, and other projects that disseminate research through commentary or aggregation. My latest favorite site to follow is LSE’s Impact of Social Sciences project as they post on great ideas for disseminating findings.

How do you stay current with your research reading?

Open Social Science?

Recently the bloggers at smaller questions took on the topic of open science. If you are not already familiar with the idea of open science, I highly recommend their post.

I continue to be in awe of the momentum within the STEM fields toward disruption of the long-standing paradigm for conducting research as well as publishing research. It may be due to my frame of reference as a doctoral student, but it seems there is not as much momentum or dialogue around open science or open access within social sciences.

What are your thoughts on the topic? What do you think about the level of engagement among social scientists in the conversation about open science and open access?

Blogging at SRA

The Society for Research on Adolescence biennial meeting is coming up on March 8th – 10th, 2012, in the beautiful city of Vancouver, BC [read: home of 49th Parallel Coffee, amazing restaurants, stunning international port city encrusted by snow capped mountains]. I am equally as excited about the conference as I am about being in one of my favorite cities in the Pacific Northwest.

At this year’s conference I will be posting daily updates over at SRA Blogs on international research and international researchers. Stay tuned!

Opposing the Research Works Act

There is a new bill that was introduced in Congress and referred to the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform called the Research Works Act. I strongly oppose this bill and welcome others to form opinions and take action (e.g. contact your representative in Congress).

Currently, all research in the U.S. funded through public dollars is required to be made available to the public – open access with no paywall to read research publications. The Research Works Act would like to introduce a paywall for the public to read all research that was publicly and privately funded. Essentially, the public would end up paying for publicly funded research twice.

To learn more about  this bill, read ProPublica’s story and check out Harvard’s Open Access Project Notes on the Research Works Act (thanks, Peter Suber for the G+ share).

Social media for social scientists

Through the ABCT Couples SIG listserv, I recently learned about the LSE’s Impact of Social Sciences Project. The purpose of the project is to measure and evaluate the impact of social science research on the public. An essential part of the project is helping social scientists disseminate their work through the use of social media — check out their resource guide, which covers topics like how to leverage Twitter and podcasts for your research. Their Handbook on maximizing the impact of research on the public is also available online.

LightSwitch

In preparation for a couple of upcoming projects, I am learning how to build database driven applications. I decided to spend time on learning to build a simple application after realizing that the tried-and-true option for these projects that others were recommending was wrangling multiple Excel files.

At first I considered Microsoft Access, however one of my upcoming projects may require multiple users. Access has many strengths, however it was not intended for multiple users. An additional consideration is that I want my applications to be web-based rather than stored on a single desktop.

I have settled on Microsoft Visual Studio LightSwitch and so far I am very, very happy with it. The Wrox book Beginning Visual Studio LightSwitch Development has been a great resource, too. And the academic discount that I found through Provantage.com has made the project financially do-able. So far I have not had to actually use any code and the process has been very straightforward.

I’ll keep you posted on my progress!

Addendum

The University of Oregon’s library system has a great scholarly communications and information support group. An especially helpful page is the addendum engine. The program constructs four types of addendums specific to your manuscript: Access-Reuse, Immediate Access, Delayed Access, or MIT Amendment.

What is an author’s addendum? It is an agreement form that authors can use to retain rights to scholarship, including posting it online or in a Scholars’ Bank.

Futurity.org

Futurity.org is a scholarly research aggregate that provides accessible summaries of research news from universities in the US, Canada, and UK. Current news is presented by topic, tags, and readers can browse by school. While scholarly articles are not always easily understood by most readers, Futurity’s editors provide clear explanations and links to the articles (which not necessarily open access). In the movement to connect interested readers with reliable science, Futurity is an essential piece of the open access movement.

Futurity www.futurity.org

Dissemination 2.0

The Research Information Network, a policy research group in the UK, has focused their attention on research dissemination in the digital age. Of interest:

Ciber (Centre for Information Behaviour and the Evaluation of Research) recently published a report on the use of social media in research, Social media and research workflow.

In a recent conversation with colleagues in psychology, we discussed the role of the web — blogs, researcher websites, web-based portfolios — in research dissemination. Some colleagues expressed concerns that websites for individual researchers, research groups, and online research dissemination communicates an undesired entrepreneurial message. The Research Information Network’s Social Media guide summarized criticisms of scholars using the web and social media as a concern for the decline of academic discussion and debate, that social media and the web are peripheral to scholarly work, and privacy concerns. Others expressed interest in leveraging the web for research dissemination, national and international professional networking, and outreach.

The intersection of research scholarship and the web, the role of the web in dissemination, and its impact on academic careers has been addressed in many forums. One example: the Chronicle of Higher Education has many entries on the pros and cons of scholarly blogging, including pieces such as Social Media Lures Academics, Scholars Who Blog, The Trouble With Blogs: Can Blogging Derail Your Career, and Academic Blogs [note: not entirely open access, subscription required for many articles]. Other examples can be found in science blogs such as Scientopia or blog aggregates such as Research Blogging or Science Blogging, which aggregates blogs from multiple languages.

My questions to researchers and non-researchers: What do you think of the intersection of research scholarship and the web? What do you think of the dissemination of research via social media? I’m curious to hear your thoughts!