Quick, and highly scientific (_Riiight—Ed._) poll.
Does anyone actually read journals for research articles anymore? I don’t mean does anyone read articles (I hope you do before you cite them…), but do people take each new issue of a journal (online or dead tree) and read through the table of contents? Do people read email ToCs? What about RSS feeds of ToCs?
Or do people just run PubMed searches (or Google Scholar) on their favourite keywords once a week/month/whatever? Or a mixture of the two?
And a related question: If you keep up to date with ToCs at least, for how many journals?
I’m genuinely curious. The question is inspired by the hundreds of articles published weekly in JBC and PLoS 1. A further question would be Is there a disciplinary divide in keeping up to date with the literature?
I read ToCs; usually through their RSS feeds, but J Immunol, J Virol, and a couple of others don’t have RSS (or didn’t last time I checked), and I don’t bother with RSS for Science and Nature, since I always remember to check them anyway. Counting the titles in the “Journals” section of my RSS reader, I see that as well as the ones above I read another 31 titles; most monthly, some biweekly (PNAS), and a couple weekly (JBC). JBC is the only one that’s a real chore to get through, and I sometimes skip it.
I also have a series of pubmed auto-queries that notify me if miss anything interesting.
That’s more or less what I do—right down to skipping JBC! Except I sometimes can’t be bothered with Science and I do use Nature ‘s RSS feed, although I usually have to wait for the DOIs to be updated (happens around Thursday night here, and the RSS updates Thurs am).
I don’t read TOCs, I just search PubMed for whatever I need to know, or for field-specific searches once in a while (and I’m subscribed to one or two PubMed searches, so they e-mail me when I need to go look).
I just don’t have time to read anything else than absolutely necessary. If I’d even so much look at TOCs I’d get distracted by things I have no business thinking about, and drift away from what I’m supposed to be doing.
No, actually I’m making up excuses now.
The real reason that I don’t read TOCs is that I have never been taught to do so, and have never seen anyone do so either. I have always been under the impression, from seeing others near me work, that everyone only searches for keywords in PubMed. I only found out about the possibility of receiving TOCs in e-mail or RSS through the geeks on the internet.
And now I’m just blaming others for my nasty habits.
Maybe it’s a combination of the two.
(I feel as if you just did a poll “Who vacuums under couch anymore?”. I feel guilty, but can’t exactly say why.)
(And no, I don’t vacuum under the couch either. Geez, what do I do…?)
I have an autosearch alerting service for anything that’s in the field of Sleep once a week. A few key papers in my field I have alerts for whenever they are cited or whenever I’m cited (one must be up on one’s H-index).
I also get the ETOCs for about 10 journals in various fields from general medicine to accident research. I also vacuum under the couch. Or do i just say that I do…
I get eTOCs for most of my relevant journals and read them, too. In addition, I’m on relevant mailinglists from where i get press-releases or abstracts of relevant publications. I use search engines only for older research.
I read ToCs (far too many). I bookmark the articles that look interesting, and promptly forget about them.
I also get dead tree versions of four journals, because I belong to the societies. There’s just something about the typeface of the stats journals that makes them so appealing aesthetically.
How about scanning one and showing us, Bob?
Hmm. I might have to, but you’ll all think I’m mad. It’s really just the fonts that LaTeX uses. Plus equations.
We all think you’re mad, anyway.
The couple of times I’ve used LaTeX I noted how old-fashioned the fonts appeared.
I subscribe to a bunch of ToC’s, but currently have >170 of them sitting unread in my inbox. Time limits and unhelpful, underscriptive titles contribute to my fear of opening them and scanning quickly through for relevant
drossarticles.And if you’ve met Bob, you’ll also realise he was a man born long after his time. He makes ol’ Chuck D look like a young whippersnapper. If he could, he’d submit all his articles on papyrus.
What intrigues me is not so much what we do now, because surely we are in a transitional period, but how will the face of scientific communication be in 5 years time? (OK, maybe 5 years is too far away). I just can’t believe that we’re all going to continue writing these papers that no-one ever reads.
A more interesting question is raised by Mike Fowler and Bob O’Hara: How do you save articles that you want to re-read? (It occurs to me that if I were a good blogger I’d put this up on my own site, but since hardly anyone reads it I likely wouldn’t get any interesting ideas.)
I mainly use Journler (sort of a notebook program, designed to save clippings and notes) nowadays to dump abstracts into, and then try to make a point of returning to Journler every so often to skim through the list and remind myself.
Ooh, I hadn’t thought of Journler (although I do have it—in my Dock, even). I use Papers. Seems to work fine.
Ian – I’ve started using Zotero. It’s working well so far, although my “yet to read” folder is going to get very big. And I’m sure I won’t use the full capacity of the software.
Mostly eTOCs for me, although I just started switching them to RSS when available. I work on so many different projects these days that I end up reading a ridiculous number of TOCs.
I use the awesome and highly recommended PubCrawler for specific searches on my previous research interests, specific authors etc. since they do not always intersect with the TOCs I read for my current job.
Bob O’Hara said: “Ian – I’ve started using Zotero.”
I used Zotero for a while, but have pretty much stopped. I ran into occasional problems with formatting. Not many, but that’s almost worse, because when you prepare a bibliography you have to squint closely at each record to see if it’s correct.
I use Bookends as my bibliography/reference/pdf storage app, and though it’s slightly more work to dump references into Bookends than Zotero, I found less aggravation overall.
I haven’t looked at the latest release of Zotero, so maybe the occasional formating problems have been fixed.