Scientific Research in the Google Era

I want to share five web tools I use for research. Kudos to Rick for introducing me to many of these.

Eigenfactor (http://www.eigenfactor.org/map/)
This is a great tool for assessing the impact of a particular journal and searching for the top journals within a discipline. If you're new to a field, this is a nice way to get some perspective on it. It has a cool interactive interface for viewing the different connections between disciplines, too. The eigenfactor score is a metric for assessing how well that journal compares to others in terms of citations per article, and it accounts for the different citation customs/frequency within different disciplines. The eigenfactors of all the journals add up to 100, so if a journal has an eigenfactor close to 0.1 or 1, that's pretty high. The Article Influence of a journal is basically the average number of citations per article in that journal. This is a great way to get a feel for the top journals in a field.

ISI Web of Knowledge (http://apps.isiknowledge.com/)
Most graduate students will be familiar with this tool, but I include it here for completness. This is my favorite journal search engine. There's also Google Scholar, PubMed, and a handful of other ones, but for bells and whistles I think ISI wins it. You can get a listing of citing papers for an article, which is a handy feature if you want to find out what is the most current research on a particular topic. It also gives you some idea of the impact of a particular paper--are those citations just follow-up papers from the same group, or are other people picking up the idea and doing new things with it? This helps you assess the quality of the paper even before you've read the abstract. If you're on a university campus, you should see a link where you can download the paper. If you're off-campus, check to see if there's a proxy server that allows you to access the journal subscription.

Zotero (http://www.zotero.com)
This is a nifty little browser plug-in that recognizes when you are at a journal website and allows you to download a snapshot of the article's bibliographic information as well as the PDF with one click! It stores the papers in a local database on your harddrive and you can search through them by author or keyword. Most journals and several websites (including Wikipedia) have "translators" built into Zotero, so that when you land on one of these pages, it knows where to look to grab the title, authors, source, etc. Once the paper is downloaded, it is even capable of indexing the PDFs so you can search through the text of the articles. You can store any webpage in Zotero, and you can highlight text and take notes in the article right from within your browser. Your annotations are saved, along with a copy of the page. There's also ways to categorize and tag articles so you can keep things organized. According to the website, plans are in the works to create a web version so you can access your research database online and share it with others.

Google Reader (http://reader.google.com)
Pretty much all journals now provide RSS feeds of their tables of contents, and many will even push abstracts and figures out through these feeds. Any RSS reader will work, but I've decided to swallow the Google pill (Gmail, Blogger, Reader, Calendar, iGoogle, etc., etc.). And it's really a great interface. Basically, I have about 12 journals that I subscribe to, and every day or two I log in and skim the titles/abstracts. I "star" the papers that I want to read. From Google Reader, you can just click on the entry and it will take you to the paper. As you scroll through the listing, it automatically marks things as read, so it's very easy to just skim.

Foxit PDF Reader (http://www.foxitsoftware.com/pdf/)
This little guy is a godsend. I used to despise Adobe Acrobat. "Oh geez...do I really want to open another PDF? I feel a crash coming on. Maybe I'll just read the HTML version and if it looks ok then I'll download it and print it out." The browser plug-in was slow, buggy, and leaked memory. The annotation tools (which are only available with the overpriced full version, which is even slower, buggier, and more leaky) were a kludge. Foxit wins in all these categories, hands down. It doesn't have a browser plug-in, but I've set Firefox to just open PDF files immediately, so it's no big deal. Foxit opens up instantly, there's very little lag in going from page to page or from zooming in/out, and it has decent annotation tools (I use highlighting quite a bit). And most importantly, it NEVER CRASHES!

del.icio.us (http://del.icio.us)
Weird name, cool tool. It's basically a bookmarking too, and they have a browser plug-in which allows you to synchronize your bookmarks among the computers you use. Each bookmark can be associated with multiple tags, and you can search through these tags very quickly. I use this to bookmark lab websites, and I tag the website based on what kind of work that lab is involved in (nano, microfluidics, mems, circuits, etc.). Neato. Here's my bookmark list.