Otto Muskens
19 May 2010
Tags: competition, originality, papers, Scientific community
Posted in Miscellaneous, PhD life

Over the last 6 months I have been checking regularly the journals to see if anyone has published something in the direction of our research project. This morning, when I was just going online to check some references, the article hit me right between the eyes. There it was, my idea, the result looking exactly as I had expected it to be. Only the names of the authors are different; a leading US research group has apparently pursued the same concept and has already obtained the result we have been looking for during the last months.
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Otto Muskens
21 April 2010
Tags: collaboration, papers, publications, survival
Posted in Getting published, Miscellaneous, Tips for senior scientists
On my desk, right in front of the computer screen, lies a pile of paper. This pile gives me headaches, keeps me awake at night, and is a source of frustration on sunny weekends. It is the pile of unfinished manuscripts, gathered and carried along from earlier positions as a postdoc. Every paper has a story attached to it. Some papers are only in their first version, hardly more than a collection of raw data. Others have seen many revisions, have passed the eyes of multiple co-authors, and have got stuck just before submission, because something just is not quite right. There are papers of PhD students, co-workers, and of myself as leading author. Some contain data taken two years ago.
I am wondering how others are dealing with their unpublished data. Do you have a drawer full of brilliant work yet to be published? Or are you completely up to date with your results? For some people, it may be a reason for boasting: look at how many data I still have on the shelf! For a starting academic, unpublished data can be a life saver in times that you are starting a new lab and you need results to cover the gaps in your publication record. However, the pile also represents months of painstaking experiments, data analysis, and theory, lying there going to waste and most importantly – not being cited.
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Klaas Wynne
3 May 2009
Tags: arXiv, bibliography, Endnote, Google scholar, JSTOR, Mac, papers, PDF, PubMed, science, Scopus, web of science, Windows, Word
Posted in Presentations quality, Technical (ms word, tex), Tips for junior scientists, Tips for senior scientists, useful software
When you are doing research, you tend to collect a lot of papers. I remember that at the end of m PhD, when I moved to another continent to do a postdoc, I dumped a huge box of photocopies in my parents’ basement. A few years ago, I had collected two cupboards full of photocopies. It was getting seriously out of hand. Then, of course, journals started putting everything online as PDFs and the same process started all over again but this time filling up hard disk folders instead. I used to have subject-based folders, which sort of worked until something fit within 2 or 3 or 4 of my subjects. Searching for some old paper you had read a few years back became more and more nightmarish. Then somebody showed me Papers.
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LifeScientist
15 January 2009
Tags: papers, PhD, research, science, semantic search engine, social networking, web2.0
Posted in Conferences, PhD life, Research and education, Tips for junior scientists, Tips for senior scientists, Web 2.0, useful software
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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.
ResearchGATE is designed for the upcoming age of Science 2.0
The tools offered by ResearchGATE are custom-made for researchers. No other platform provides such a wide range of web 2.0 applications exactly matching the needs of the scientific community. New features are constantly added, always state-of-the-art and no-frills. This makes ResearchGATE the best social network choice for scientists.
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Readers' comments
Thanks for the advice. It sounds almost too simple and like something people should come up by themselves. Unfortunately, most ...
19 Jul 2010 8:46, Julio E. Peironcely
Getting grants funded is a much less platonic enterprise than the science itself. I recently ran into a science professor ...
20 Jun 2010 19:32, Gijs
Hi, One question - where would you include correspondence? Some journals e.g. Nature publish "Letters" as full articles, whereas, correspondence elsewhere ...
11 Jun 2010 23:09, MH
I agree with what have been said above. Should the normalization be done against the total number of publications he/she authored/co-authored ...
8 Jun 2010 23:08, labuddy
I spent the spare time on the unfinished ideas,because the working time is controlled strictly by the boss and ...
7 Jun 2010 14:26, danxian