Get That Feed!
Feed Reader: Knowledge and procrastination right at my fingertips - conveniently linked to my gmail account.
How do you keep on track of the new papers in your field? My PhD is in a highly saturated field of cardiovascular disease and mechanisms of oxidative stress. There are tens of somewhat relevant papers published daily on the subject. The only way to surf this information tide is to sign up to the RSS feeds with the names of the most prominent labs and researchers in the field.
Conveniently, every day I open my Google Reader and have it spit out the fresh literature according to my requests. Do you make good use of the feed readers, which are also called aggregators? There are plenty different ones to serve every working style and aesthetic taste.
Another great use of this tool is to get a regular feed of my favourite blogs. These are full of wisdom and useful tips about the PhD experience, amazing science, thesis writing advice and many more.
Just to name a few thesis-related ones, I subscribe to:
The Thesis Whisperer - amazing resource, regularly updated, often entertaining and full of relevant tips on the whole PhD experience from procrastination to writing papers, dealing with supervisors, spouses or cats (not really!) http://thesiswhisperer.com/
patter: generally interesting stuff, uni- and academia-related. One of the recent examples is travel diary: what academics do in hotel rooms http://wp.me/p1GJk8-a6
I could not help but re-tweet this recent pearl from The Literature Review IQ: Dear supervisor, I baked you a literature review – It’ll make you want to vomit http://bit.ly/JSr22Z
I highly recommend James Hayton’s http://www.threemonththesis.com/ Although the website and the blog have been changing recently, some of the content is really spot on!
The downside of the whole aggregator concept is that you can be feedin’ on the info at the expense of real work! For a person like me (confession, sad face) lacking in willpower and motivation (only at times!), this great resource can become a procrastination trap. Imagine how easy it is to open an article on the “how to burn through your thesis” and get lost in reading the good advice without actively applying it! Say, I’ll open it on a Monday morning thinking: “Oh yeah, I’ll read this for half an hour - it’ll boost my productivity”. Three hours later I wake up from the growls of my stomach because it is lunch time! And I have to admit, - to my advantage, I do not read the news!
So, watch it - aggregators and blogs are a great tool if used wisely and sparingly! The resource is fascinating - it makes so much easier to keep up to date with the world - whether it is the big wide one or the one within the bounds of your thesis.
How do you keep on track of the new papers in your field? My PhD is in a highly saturated field of cardiovascular disease and mechanisms of oxidative stress. There are tens of somewhat relevant papers published daily on the subject. The only way to surf this information tide is to sign up to the RSS feeds with the names of the most prominent labs and researchers in the field.
Conveniently, every day I open my Google Reader and have it spit out the fresh literature according to my requests. Do you make good use of the feed readers, which are also called aggregators? There are plenty different ones to serve every working style and aesthetic taste.
Another great use of this tool is to get a regular feed of my favourite blogs. These are full of wisdom and useful tips about the PhD experience, amazing science, thesis writing advice and many more.
Just to name a few thesis-related ones, I subscribe to:
The Thesis Whisperer - amazing resource, regularly updated, often entertaining and full of relevant tips on the whole PhD experience from procrastination to writing papers, dealing with supervisors, spouses or cats (not really!) http://thesiswhisperer.com/
patter: generally interesting stuff, uni- and academia-related. One of the recent examples is travel diary: what academics do in hotel rooms http://wp.me/p1GJk8-a6
I could not help but re-tweet this recent pearl from The Literature Review IQ: Dear supervisor, I baked you a literature review – It’ll make you want to vomit http://bit.ly/JSr22Z
I highly recommend James Hayton’s http://www.threemonththesis.com/ Although the website and the blog have been changing recently, some of the content is really spot on!
The downside of the whole aggregator concept is that you can be feedin’ on the info at the expense of real work! For a person like me (confession, sad face) lacking in willpower and motivation (only at times!), this great resource can become a procrastination trap. Imagine how easy it is to open an article on the “how to burn through your thesis” and get lost in reading the good advice without actively applying it! Say, I’ll open it on a Monday morning thinking: “Oh yeah, I’ll read this for half an hour - it’ll boost my productivity”. Three hours later I wake up from the growls of my stomach because it is lunch time! And I have to admit, - to my advantage, I do not read the news!
So, watch it - aggregators and blogs are a great tool if used wisely and sparingly! The resource is fascinating - it makes so much easier to keep up to date with the world - whether it is the big wide one or the one within the bounds of your thesis.
RSS Feed