When you start your career as a postgraduate student, it is normal that you start collecting your scientific results in a slightly unorganized way. However as time proceeds, some basic rules are needed to keep track of your work. Every scientist has to develop his own systems for keeping organized. Ideally, a minimal set of rules should be used consistently by group members, including staff members and students, to facilitate data exchange. Perhaps some aspects appear trivial, but in my contact with undergraduate and postgraduate students I have seen many shocking examples of (lack of) data management. Here I give an example of how to organize data using a Windows operating system, based on my own set of rules. Again it should be emphasized that this is just one example of an organizational structure, which is aimed at avoiding some of the most common mistakes.

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The Internet is here to stay. Besides its many advantages two major drawbacks are daily visible: (i) abuse of anonymity and (ii) lack of quality control of presented information. These two issues are related: if  an onymous (pun intended) person with an impeccable reputation endorses an article on the web, chances are high that the paper is indeed of quality.

If the number of clients, customers, or members of not-for-profit or commercial enterprises runs in the thousands, the executives of these organizations would like to bind their clients. Issuing trading stamps is a strategy that is already older than a century. Another line of approach, more suitable for our times,  is to build a virtual community, forum or network. Newspapers, scientific journals, and universities have created their interactive web sites. Software companies do it. These communities will only blossom if the group of customers is not too much of a mixed bag and if the customers get something valuable in return when joining. A possible benefit for joining is the facilitation of communication with other members or with the officials of the organization.

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Social networks are everywhere. Personally I like Facebook to keep track of old friends and add new ones. These friends are mostly of nonscientific background. Until recently I had never realized the importance of social networks in science. When you do your PhD and perhaps some postdoc projects here and there, it is hard to think about what it takes to become a successful scientist other than doing brilliant science. Although scientific skills are undoubtedly important, I believe that one of the key ingredients which can make or break a scientific career is a good network of friends.

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Nowadays Wikipedia is commonly used by scientists at every possible level to make quick and dirty check on the most various facts. It might be the exact form of a mathematical formula, the definition of some quantity or even the birthdate of some famous collegue. For simple facts we can say that Wikipedia entries are rather accurate; anyhow if the validity of the information you are searching is really an important issue you should never trust the net and you better search some good reference. The biggest doubts arises when you start looking on articles regarding your field of expertise: the best you can hope is that they are incomplete but, most of the time, you can easily find blatant mistakes or huge misconceptions.

Nothing to be surprised of: most likely that article wasn’t written by an expert but by a student that has either a second hand knowledge of the subject or didn’t yet manage to grasp it. Since it is your field of expertise you probably know everything about it so you don’t need the Wikipedia article; therefore you are probably not interested at all in making it better. You will just leave it as it is with a slightly worse opinion of Wikipedia quality.

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I think Wikipedia articles should never be allowed as references in the primary scientific literature.

Generation gap
The young generation is on Facebook, MySpace and Twitter. The older generation, if participating in a social network, will join the more sober-headed  LinkedIn. Young people even leave a virtual social network if they discover that too many members are of the old generation. I still remember situations where faculty members refused to use a computer or email.

In many cases they were cheaters, because all that computer work was done by their secretaries. Innovations are invariably accompanied by people denying their usefulness. After a period of habituation the new development is widely accepted. This pattern of denial, hostile reception to acceptance is notorious. Any critical remark on a modern development is returned with “You are old-fashioned. You better get used to the new situation”.

By the same token, any critical remark on the importance of web 2.0 developments for science is reciprocated by this “Wake up old guy!”. I am sure the rest of this post will meet the same resistance.

Summary
Reed-Elsevier’s daughter Elsevier has introduced as an experiment a new way of publishing science. The “paper” is now basically a website, in which the idea of a linear text is abandoned. The web interface implements access to text fragments, graphs, supplementary material, interview with an author, through hyperlinked tabs and mundane hyperlinks. In my opinion this development is a step backward and scientist should avoid publishing their material this way.

Elsevier’s solution to a non-existing problem
Scientist agree that way too many papers are being published. In addition commercial publishers keep on launching new journals in an already overcrowded market. The desktop-publishing  innovation has radically improved the productivity of scientists. There are many factors that hamper the progress of science, but the alleged inadequacy of present-day science publishing is not one of them.

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Every scientific journal nowadays has a web-listing with a lot of useful links added to each abstract page, like citing and related articles. This features are among commodities for almost any web-publishing service.  Many news websites or other political or economic magazines allow, or even actively solicit, comments from their readers on their websites. This feature is (deliberately) absent for scientific publications.

I am wondering, why? I discussed this issue with a few senior researchers and a publisher. They were all against allowing web-comments. That describes why it has not yet happened, but I am not yet convinced that it is impossible. Here, I list a few of their reasons and some thought of my own.

Quality and Credibility: One major concern about web-comments is their quality. The level of discussion must be kept high, unless a good comment will be hidden among thousands of mere “opinions” of “professional comment writers” who comment on everything. Even on very popular blogs, more than fifty comments is often not followed anymore.

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I used to go to the library. Every couple of weeks or so I would go and check the journals, browse through their tables of content (TOCs), and flip through the pages. You would find odd articles in areas there weren’t quite your own. Slowly over time journals got bigger and were published more frequently. Then they started emailing TOCs out, which seemed like a pretty good improvement as you could just read them on your computer. Gradually, I started to run out of time: the TOCs were just too long and there were too many of them. Virtual journals (such as the Virtual Journal of Ultrafast Science) offered some hope but they don’t cover all journals such as Elsevier journals, so you would still end up having to read a bunch of emailed TOCs.

For a couple of years, I tried an RSS reader. A free reader, such as NetNewsWire for the Mac or FeedDemon for Windows (http://www.newsgator.com/individuals/) can collect RSS feeds containing TOCs from you chosen journal. FeedDemon has to possibility of searching through your feeds. That worked pretty well until I switched to a Mac and found that NetNewsWire couldn’t search through feeds. By the time the TOCs were simply to huge to read them “raw”.

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Every scientist has to cope with the problem of managing references (or citations, or notes, or literature, or whatever you call it.)  When writing his second paper he discovers that he has to type a number of references that he already typed in when preparing his first paper. This repetitive action calls for a repository of references. In an ideal world many group members submit their references to this repository and after some time a very efficient storage medium has been created.

Pitfalls
Alas. The real world is never like this. And for many reasons. Typos in entries will live for ever, or will give rise to duplicate entries. Incomplete entries will downgrade the usefulness of the database. Inconsistent use of case (uppercase, lowercase, title case) is causing a mess. Different spelling of names will lead to duplicate entries, or to angry readers when they see their name misspelled in a list of references in an article in a high-impact journal. Many programs (or ‘wizards’) that import references cannot deal with extended characters (leave alone Unicode).  Names with diacritics (like umlauts) are dealt with either inconsistently or wrongly.  Partitioning of names into initials, first names and last names is full of traps and many import filters fall in those traps. In this respect the following error in the book Latex by Leslies Lamport (an excellent book and excellent macro package, of course) is typical: on page 141 (Chapter on “The Bibliography Database”) Lamport discusses “von Beethoven, Ludwig”. The name of course is Ludwig van Beethoven, as the name is of Flemish origin. And indeed “Van” is not his middle name.

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ResearchGATE works to the benefit of science

Every discovery or invention is based upon previous discoveries or inventions. This is what makes communication so essential for science. ResearchGATE empowers science by connecting the scientific community. Our platform enables researchers to communicate faster, better and easier. This will accelerate the distribution of knowledge – and create new ideas.

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Being connected with co-researchers is a great advantage for every scientist. You can present your profile and your work, manage and extend your professional contacts, join or found groups, ask or answer questions, share or search papers and much more. This collaboration makes everybody’s work much more effective. And it’s free, safe and without spam.

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