Category: Scientific library

How to research quickly a state of the art – Practical guide

Every scientific oeuvre starts with a state of the art. A state of the art is a text that summarizes the key concepts on the topic, explains the current status of the subject, and discuss the latest advances and challenges in the field.

This text is the starting point of the arguments that follow. It establishes a common ground between the writer and the reader. It is like an updated map of the subject that serves both the author to know how to organize the ideas and the reader to understand the context.

Create such a map is very useful when you are learning a new topic. You need a map to orient yourself. How the topic looks like. Its structure, variants, extension. Once you grab the main structure of the topic and its possibilities, you can lose yourself in the details wherever part catches more your attention.

I am talking about finding a few key resources that capture the essence of a topic and used them to sketch a mind map to orient yourself. This strategy is helpful in many situations. During learning, your mind map helps you to understand where each piece of information fits in the overall picture. When you are discussing a complex topic, your mind map puts your arguments into perspective with respect to the arguments of the rest of the people in the conversation.

Educate yourself quickly about a specific topic from the source is a useful skill. For example, assess the state of the art of a new technology or summarize the key arguments on a subject.

Scientific subjects can be very dense and difficult to follow. Having clear the basics makes a whole difference when diving into the topic.

So, how can we build this map in practice?

Search

Let assume that you are already familiarized with the basic terms of the topic of interest. You can express the subject in your own words and explain the key ideas to someone else. You aren’t novice anymore. You are ready to read SCIENCE, with capital letters.

At this point, you want to read scientific literature to create your own deep understanding of the topic. You need a list of few keywords on the subject. Don’t worry if your list is not too extensive, with 4 or 5 terms should be enough to start. As soon as you make your first queries, you will fine-tune those terms with related keywords.

If you are unfamiliar with scientific databases and you don’t know which one to use, I suggest starting with Semantic Scholar. It is a general database with many cool features enhancing the literature skim.

For the first query start with my 3-terms-formula

  1. Top 1 keyword of your topic. It can be a single word or a multi-word term
  2. Niche or application. This part is optional. It depends on how specific your initial keyword is, but in most cases, the top keyword is too broad.
  3. Review. Add the word “review” to get review articles. Review articles will give you a broader view of your topic and they contextualize the rest of the publications in the field.

Let’s imagine that you want to learn the state of the art of artificial intelligence applications in the healthcare industry. Your first keyword would be “artificial intelligence” and the second keyword or the niche “healthcare” and finish with “review”.

Within the first 10 results, you can already see two interesting articles. You can continue the search with different angles, playing with related terms like “machine learning” or “medicine”, and see what comes out.

Once you find a good keyword combination, you can move to the searching options. In Semantic Scholar there is an option where you can sort by relevance, citation count, most influential, and recency. I would play with these options to see how the results vary.

If after these tweaks you still haven’t found a perfect match you can narrow it down by filtering the field of study and publication type.

Try also removing the word “review” to see if there is an article that hit the bull’s eye.

Select

The scientific literature is vast and there is more information than we will ever be able to read. So, be very selective especially with your first articles. 

Select between 5 to 10 articles. Even if you think you are missing something by leaving out certain papers, don’t worry. Each review article will give you tons of references to read.

Chose a minimum of 2 articles from different authors. Although keywords are similar between authors there are always analogous terms for the same concept. Capturing this variability will help you to understand better the topic.

Look for the most relevant publications in the last two to five years. This is a rule of thumb. It depends a lot on the field. For fast-paced topics, 3 years is already old material.

Recent articles are better, not only because the information is updated, but also because it is easier to go back in time than forward. Think that if you read a paper from 2016, all the studies cited in the text will be from 2015 or older. You are missing references to the most recent studies.

Read

Now, you are ready to go. Download the articles. Add them to your library. Read, highlight, tag.

This will take you at least a couple of days. This process is time-consuming: identifying relevant articles, selecting which ones are worth adding to your scientific library, and actually reading the articles in depth. So, the stricter you are during your selection the more meaningful/practical/productive your reading time will be later.

The good news is that you only have to do it once. After that, you will set up a system to keep you updated automatically. Because the purpose of building your own scientific library is to have a resourceful tool and not a burden.

Let’s recap for a moment. Out of our initial search of the state of the art, we should have identified a maximum of 10 articles. Most of them reviews. Preferably published in the last 2 years.

Again, do not be afraid of left interesting articles out of your initial top ten selection. If they are worth it, they will come back to you via a citation in context or in future searches with different search criteria.

Keep up to date

After reading all this new knowledge, you will know where you want to go next. From this point, you have two roads to follow. The active and the passive way.

The active way consists in look for all the references that have caught your attention during reading, plus additional searches of new relevant terms you have found out. This is the case when you want to know more about the subject immediately. In this way, you can go as far and as deep as you want.

The passive way is intended to keep you updated in long term. It consists in feed yourself automatically with relevant publications on a weekly basis. We will explore both methods in the next posts.

Conclusion

Those are just the first steps in outlining the main lines of a new knowledge map. Educating yourself and comprehending the current status of a complex subject can’t be done overnight, but with these steps, you can quickly reach a good point of understanding.

A state of the art consists in read a lot. What is important is not only to read but also to capture the information to use it later. In this blog, I discuss how can we do that in a practical and efficient way.

For now, start your scientific library following these steps in your topic of interest. In the next posts, we will see how to keep it updated with little effort and massive results.

Your turn

What topic you would like to research the state of the art?

Leave us your answer in the comments.

Scientific databases – which one should you use

We have already explained in this blog what types of scientific articles exist. Now, you may wonder – where I can find scientific articles? How do I know what has been published on my subject? Because googling doesn’t lead me to scientific studies.

Well, I have good news. Even on Google, there is a specific section for searching scientific studies. It is called google scholar. But there are many more resources other than google.

Scientific databases

Usually, the first time you arrive at a scientific study is by following the references of other texts. As we saw in where to start the research of a new scientific topic,  you follow a path from general sources to more specific sources.

Once you have pass the basic level, you have read a few sources and you want to gain perspective on the subject.

For that, you need to review the studies published on that specific topic. You need a tool to search scientific literature. This tool is a scientific database.

Scientific databases, or academic databases, not only encompass journal articles, but also conference proceedings, books, doctoral theses, and other scientific-related documents.

As mentioned above, we can use google scholar. Technically, it’s not a database, it’s a search engine that looks for information everywhere, including scientific databases. However, since it looks at the whole web, which is too vast, makes it difficult to rank on the first page the references you are looking for.

So, what are the alternatives?

The two biggest scientific databases

In the world of scientific databases, there are two big commercial actors: Scopus and Web of Science, previously known as Web of Knowledge.

These two are the biggest databases with over 70 million references each. The problem is that these databases are intended for institutions, and they are quite expensive. These are the databases you will find in the library of a university. In many cases, if you go in-person to the library of a university you can use one of these databases for free in the computers of the library even if you are not a student. So, if by chance you have the opportunity to access a university maybe it is worth passing over the library and search on these databases.

The problem with these databases is that you can’t use them unless you belong to an institution that pays for access. But they are so relevant, that you need to know about their existence.  The rest of the resources I am going to show you below are accessible for everyone, at least the bibliographical data. The documents themselves, in some cases, will be under a subscription fee or a paywall. In a future post, I will explain how to deal with that.

Free access general databases

An alternative to these multidisciplinary databases is JSTOR. Although access to most of the documents is not free, it is a great tool to find research papers.

JSTOR has a cool feature called text analyzer, currently in beta, which could be interesting in particular cases. You can paste a text or drag a document and the tool identifies the keywords of the text giving you back related documents.

A tool like that is interesting to trigger a serendipity search to find documents related to your specific topic of interest which initially don’t seem naturally connected to you. Serendipity accidents are considered to have a potential for innovation because connect ideas from different fields that are not related a priori. Let us a comment below with your experience using this tool.

Another great tool is Semantic Scholar. In this case, they use the power of artificial intelligence to extract meaning from scientific literature making the search more efficient than the traditional keyword search.

Most of the databases use the metadata defined by the authors to sort the document and make suggestions. However, Semantic Scholar extracts the topics discussed in the article directly from the text and suggest related studies base on it. It also differentiates the type of citation (highly influential, background, methods, results) which is very valuable information to get the ball rolling in the direction of your interest to find relevant references. Other features that have enormous potential are: filter by papers with pdf available and create feeds of latest papers by topic of interest (currently in beta).

Another alternative worth exploring is ScienceOpen with several features to enhance research discovery.

This is the nice part! Every tool has small tweaks that make them special. You have to find the one that works better for you.

Thematic databases

The thematic databases are the most practical resources to find relevant scientific articles because you are already looking within a specific area of knowledge reducing the ambiguity of queries that belongs to several fields.

For example, if you query “arm biomechanics” in a life science database you will retrieve studies of the mechanical aspects of the human arm. However, with the same query in an engineering database, you will retrieve articles on robotics devices. In a computer sciences database, you will get research on human-machine interaction. And, in social sciences databases, you will obtain papers on anthropology. So, by choosing the database you will already reduce the scope of your search, which is good.

For the sake of simplicity in the following list, I highlight the main scientific databases sorted by area of knowledge. All databases provide similar tools for search, filter, and create alerts. I invite you to explore all the possibilities of the database most relevant for your scientific library.

  • PubMed – medicine and life science
  • IEEE Xplore – engineering, technology, and computer science
  • arXiv – physics, mathematics, and computer science
  • dblp – computer science
  • SSRN – social sciences and humanity
  • EconBiz – economics
  • ERIC – education science

Open Access Repositories

All the resources mentioned above are great, and lead you to a ton of references worth reading. However, there is a small problem. In many cases, they lead you to a scientific article that is under payroll where you only have access to the abstract and the list of references but not the full text. This could be a bit frustrating especially at the beginning when you don’t have resources at your disposal like a university library.

One way to avoid this problem is by searching only on open access repositories. Open access is a type of publication where the reader has free access to the full text because the publisher covers the cost or the authors have paid a fee to publish open access. Fortunately for the world, the scientific publication business is moving in that direction and it is becoming more and more common to publish in open access format.

Again, I list below the main Open Access Repositories for you to explore the one that fits better your interests.

  • DOAJ – all disciplines
  • Paperity – all disciplines
  • CORE – all disciplines
  • OpenDOAR – all disciplines
  • Zenodo – all disciplines
  • BioMedCentral – medicine and life science
  • PLOS – medicine and life science
  • arXiv – physics, mathematics, and computer science
  • JURN – mainly arts and humanities but also business and law

Other resources – Gateways

Gateways are centralized access points to a network. In our case, this means, they are search tools that retrieve documents from specific databases.

For example, ScienceDirect is a well-known gateway to access all the documents published by Elsevier. Elsevier is indeed the largest scientific publisher, but it will not show you results from any other publishers which is quite limiting. You can find similar tools from other publishers like Springer or Wiley.

Another scientific gateway is science.gov, the search tool of the U.S. government on science information that offers scientific and technical information of the main U.S. federal agencies (NASA, EPA, NIH, US Department of Transportation, Department of Homeland Security among others). In turn, science.gov belongs to the WorldWideScience.org, which provides a similar service but for all the participant nations (more than 70 countries).

These national portals offer different possibilities than the pure scientific databases because they give access to additional science-related documents beyond peer-reviewed publications, like technical reports, internal research, surveys, patents, guidelines, etc, by country instead of by discipline.

Bonus line, if you are interested in this last point you may want to check The World Factbook.

Conclusion

All these resources are great, but you should not forget your principal goal. The purpose is not to know all the databases that exist but to find the one that works the best for you and create a system that keeps you updated on autopilot efficiently and effortlessly, as we will see in the next post.

Your turn

Which of the databases works the best for you? In which field are you interested? Do you use other resources to find literature?

Leave us your answer in the comments.

Types of scientific articles – structure and purpose

Not all scientific articles, aka papers, are the same. Each kind of article has a different purpose. For example, some papers present new data while others discuss data already published.

Understanding the differences and the purpose of each type of article makes dive into a topic more efficient. It also helps you to skim the articles much faster. An important skill to keep your scientific library as a practical tool avoiding been submerged in an ever-growing folder of articles pending to read.

There are two main types of scientific articles that you need to master, original research articles and review articles.

Original research articles

The original research article is the standard and most important type of article. It is the basic block of scientific communications and it is also the most common article you will find.

These articles are primary sources. That means it communicates original data generated by the authors. It could be data obtained by experimentation, observation, or theorization.

This type of article follows always the same structure:

  1. Introducction of the scientific question or hypothesis.
  2. Methodology employed to perform the study.
  3. Results of the study.
  4. Discussion of the results.

Review articles

The review articles, on the contrary, are secondary sources. Review articles do not present new data, but collect, reorganize, and summarize the existing literature with a new perspective.

This type of article is intended to give a comprehensive analysis of a specific topic by synthesizing the key points in the field. Some review articles go a step further and formulate new hypotheses based on the open questions of previous studies.

Review articles are generally written by authoritative researchers that understand deeply the topic. They string together all the ramifications of the field in a compressive way, proportionating a wide perspective of the topic.

For this reason, review articles are the most enlightening text to read when you are new in a field. I recommend reading review articles before reading original research articles because the review articles give you the context necessary to frame the relevance of a particular study.

Other types of articles

Without doubts, these two types of articles are the most important and they constitute the gross of the scientific literature. Nevertheless, there are other types of articles worth knowing.

Short scientific communications are quick synopses of preliminary results. Usually, they do not have enough results for a full paper, but a few data points worth sharing. Therefore, they are intended to stimulate discussion and proportionate the seeds for deeper studies.

Conference proceedings are abstract or short scientific communications that have been presented in a conference. The relevance of these articles depends on the field. In most fields, conference proceedings are not included in the formal categories of scientific literature. In part because the content of the proceedings ends up published in a formal paper within a more complete study.

However, in fast-changing fields, like computer vision, artificial intelligence, or cybersecurity among others, conference proceedings are more relevant because the advances happen so fast that the peer-reviewed process is too slow to cope with the new developments. These fields are so competitive and fast-paced that researchers do not bother to spend time writing a formal paper. They rather prefer to invest that time in continuing the research.

If you are interested in these fields, it is worth it to follow those conferences closely, since relying only on formal articles may keep you a little behind the latest results.

Editorials are articles expressing the author’s view about a particular issue relevant to the audience of the journal. Usually, criticize or discuss a publication accepted in the journal presenting briefly the subject with no aim of a full review.

Other resources

PhD thesis or dissertations are the results of a PhD student’s research. This text is very useful to dig into the details on how the research was carried on. Generally, in a thesis dissertation, you can find greater details of the methods than what you can read in the publications derived from that research. Usually, they also include lots of appendices with raw data.

Books or tertiary literature synthesize primary literature that has been around for a long period and is widely accepted in the research community. These are also great resources to get familiar with a topic and understand the basis of the field.

Other resources could be interesting to include in your scientific library depends on your topic of interest:

  • patents
  • best-practices guidelines
  • technical reports from governmental agencies, ONG’s or other institutions
  • official reports from public authorities, or private firms

All those documents are gold mines for you to build your knowledge database, to back up your arguments, and to create a solid base for your work. You have to explore what type of documents are more relevant for you.

Tell us

What type of article do you find more useful in your field?

Leave us your answer in the comments.

How science works? – The big picture

Science is an abstract word. I am sure you have an idea of what science is. But can you explain exactly how science works?

The first idea that came to mind is: science is done by scientists. Ok, but what exactly a scientist do? Because if you search on google images the word scientist, you will see an endless list of pictures of people with white lab coats and blue gloves.

But this stereotype only represents a very small branch of science. Experimental biologists and chemists. As you can imagine, not all scientists work with test tubes in a lab.

A scientist is any person who conducts scientific research on a specific topic to understand how nature works and push the boundaries of human knowledge. In fact, the most genuine skill to become a scientist is the use of the scientific method. Not a lab coat. Not a PhD.

Where scientific research takes place

Nowadays, scientific research is mostly carried out in research groups within universities and research institutions, private and public alike. You certainly have heard about universities like Stanford University, the University of Oxford, or the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). And research institutions like NASA in the United States, Max Planck Society in Germany, CNRS in France, or CSIC in Spain. Indeed, most of the countries have national-level institutions that group diverse research centers and laboratories around a branch of knowledge.

In some highly relevant fields, there are even international agencies, such as the World Health Organization (WHO), the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), or UNESCO. But at the very end, the research, the experiments themselves are performed in all those small research groups disseminated in many different centers around the world.

What scientists do

These research groups perform experiments following the scientific method and report publicly their results. They also replicate results from other groups to confirm or challenge their scientific assumptions until the scientific community reaches a consensus.

The scientific community is all those researchers who have contributed to the field by publicly reporting their results. This public reporting process is carried out via peer-reviewed publication.

How science is evaluated

Peer-reviewed publication is the tool we have to evaluate the quality of a research study. Once a scientist or a group of scientists have the results of a study, they write a scientific article explaining: the context and motivation of their study, the detailed method they used to perform the study, the results, and the discussion.

The first version of this report is called manuscript and it is submitted to a journal where reviewers, other scientists in the same field, evaluate if the methods used for the study follow the scientific method and if the conclusions are within the scope of the methods employed.

Reviewers do not judge the results. They only comment objectively on the quality, significance, and originality of the results.

For example, I am a reviewer for several journals in the fields of biomechanics, computational mechanics, and tissue mechanics. I have reviewed studies of scientists from North and South America, Europe, and Asia. As a reviewer, I check that the methods they have employed follow the scientific standards and that there are no flaws in their experiments based on my knowledge on the topic.

What we call science

Once a manuscript is accepted, it becomes a scientific study published in a peer-reviewed journal, also known as paper. These papers are the basic blocks of science. Over time, the best studies/papers are replicated and used as the base for further studies becoming common knowledge (consensus among the scientific community).

This knowledge is the state-of-the-art until someone proved it wrong or have a better theory to explain the same phenomenon. This is a very important point to understand about science. There is no experiment to demonstrate that something is right, you can only prove that something is wrong.

This is how science evolves.

One day, I will write a post about the shortcomings and limitations of the peer-review process. However, for now, this is the best tool we have to evaluate research and the most accepted way to communicate science.

Your turn

What do you think about how science works?

Leave us your opinion in the comments.

The 4 levels of research on a new topic

Scientific studies are highly-narrowed texts which require previous knowledge to understand the key ideas. Therefore, this is not a good starting point if you are new in a research topic. Depending on your knowledge on a specific subject, your starting point will be different.

In this post, I enumerate all the stages you go through before jumping into scientific articles.

Awareness – first contact

Sometimes you are reading technical content and you come up with a technical term. It could be a method, a substance, or a concept that you have never heard before.

In such situations, the first thing I recommend is to search on Wikipedia, to have a first idea of what this word is about.

Can happen that this term does not exist yet in Wikipedia. Then, google it, and this will leads you to posts in specialized blogs or comments in technical forums where you can start to frame this new term in a specific field.

This is the very first step. At this level, you are only looking for a definition and a few ideas associated with this new concept. With the word framed in a context, you gather new keywords related to which you connect with other concepts you already know. Or it opens a new branch in your knowledge tree.

Either way, you start to figure out what this term is about.

Novice – understanding

Now, with a wider perspective, you can look for those keywords in specializes websites, tech blogs, medical forums, YouTube channels, etc.

If the term you are researching is commercialized, it is convenient to look at the webpage of the companies that work on it. Commonly, they have illustrative videos explaining how they materialize this concept to their specific products or services, in a very friendly and intuitive way.

After consulting several pages, you have a clear idea of what this new term is and how it works from a general point of view. You start to familiarize yourself with the scientific jargon related and you can express the concept in your own words.

To go a step further, you should check the references cited on those pages. Frequently, discussions about technical concepts reference to more technical content via links embedded in the text or via footnotes at the bottom of the page.

As you dig deeper into the topic you will see references to more specific sources. And, ultimately they will lead you to books or scientific studies. At this level, you are not a novice anymore. You start to understand the topic and shift from just learning to questioning.

Advanced – getting serious

When you chose a topic to master, I recommend beginning with book chapters or review articles before to jump into scientific studies.

Books and review articles are not primary sources. In other words, they are a collection of studies organized around a topic written from a broader perspective. They are less specific than a scientific study and have longer introductions with many references.

Besides, review texts already separate the chaff from the wheat. They highlight the key studies in the field. The ones which have moved the research forward. They give you a good overview of the state of the art of the topic up to the publication date.

Those are the studies you have to collect first on your scientific library.

Mater – getting into the details

Original research articles are the fundamental block of science communication. They are the primary sources, where the methodology, the results, and the limitations of a study are detailed.

By carefully reading the key studies of the field you will have already come in contact with most of the ideas on the subject.

Now, you are ready to read any subject-related scientific study and understand where to put the piece in your mental puzzle. You can file them, and tag them, with a solid background.

In practice

This is an overview of the different levels you go through during research.

You don’t necessarily go through all of them that depend on your previous knowledge on the subject and your desire to go deeper, but to be efficient I recommend moving from one level to the next one without jumping a level. Because if you move too fast, you will find yourself with big holes in your understanding of the subject and it will slow down your research process.

Question for you

What is the process you follow when you start researching a new topic? Have you ever come across a scientific study and not understood anything?

Leave us your response in the comments.

The 6 profiles who leverage the most from creating their own scientific library

It is clear that googling is not enough and we have to collect our database of distilled information, but who will get the most out of building their own scientific library.

I am not talking just about collecting and storing scientific articles. I mean to learn to read science and interpret scientific results in a practical way ready to use in your projects.

The 6 profiles who leverage the most are:

  • Content creators
  • R&D professionals
  • Advisors and data-driven decision-makers
  • People interested in a very specific topic
  • Undergraduate students
  • PhD candidates and scientists

Content creators

You are a blogger, an author, a YouTuber, or any kind of non-fictional content creator. You need to produce rich content constantly to gain an authoritative voice and become a reference figure in your field or industry.

For that, you have to be well-documented with facts, studies, researches, and analyses to support your arguments. You often read web articles and books about the topic, but you want to be authentic, you don’t want to vomit out others’ opinions.

So, you need to read directly the source, interpret it, and create your own judgments.

Scientific studies are the fundamental blocks of science. Understanding the scope and limitations of the scientific studies and mastering the art of reading a large number of articles will build up your confidence in the topic and create your unique and trusted voice.

R&D professionals

You are part of a team. You develop new products, create new services, or work with new technologies. There is no manuals or roadmap to follow. You have to find your way out by yourself, providing new ideas.

No one is going to tell you what to try next. Your best chance to move forward is to be up-to-date with the latest advances in your field. You need data to test your ideas and to propose new approaches.

It is the moment to consult your scientific library and get inspired by different ideas that have been already tested and probably you can adapt to your specific challenge.

Advisors and data-driven decision-makers

You have to make decisions in an organization or advise people who make decisions. You are responsible for an area of expertise and you are frequently asked to make decisions or advise with little or no time to research the topic.

You’d better do the work upfront. During crisis-free times, you collect and curate scientific studies that will support your decisions next time, giving you confidence and building authority with your colleagues.

People interested in a very specific topic

There are many reasons why someone could be interested in a single particular topic. For instance, the case where you want to know more about a specific disease.

You or someone close to you suffer from rare diseases. You feel lonely and clueless about how serious it is, what options you have, what you can expect.

I cannot imagine a stronger motivation to build your own scientific library than focus on your own issue. Just by understanding better what’s going on, we feel much better, less stressed, relieved. Nowadays science advances very fast. You can be up-to-date with the latest advances related to your disease. Reading the evolution of the research can give you a realistic view of the situation.

Another situation could be the inheritance of a family business, for example, a farm that you would like to modernize.

You want to find more efficient ways to irrigate, so you start motivated reading some studies related to your specific crop and take some notes.

The time pass and one day discussing with your partner about the next move, one study comes to your mind but you don’t remember the details. This is a good moment to pick your digital scientific library and discuss it with the data at hand.

Undergraduate Students

It is the beginning of the semester. Your teacher has explained that for the final evaluation you have to write a long essay. You know that filling so many pages is not going to be easy.

A good moment to start to collect information. You don’t need to start to write on a white page. Only with thirty minutes of work per week, you can collect enough information along the semester to write several essays. You just need to extract the key results, structure them in a meaningful way, and write your interpretation of the data. Easy peasy!

PhD candidates and scientists

This is probably the clearest profile for building a scientific library. You work in science and you have to be up-to-date with scientific literature. Not only for research but also to write and communicate your results. For each paper you read, you find four more to add to the reading list. Your folder of papers to read it only grows.

You need a method to organize all those papers efficiently to find them when you need them. Because the world needs you to do your best job to advance human knowledge, so all of us can have a better life.

Stay tuned

Well, I am here to help you all. I will show the tricks and the tools that scientists use to handle that. To make your relation with scientific literature smoother, practical, useful.

In which of the 6 profiles do you identify yourself the most? You don’t fit in any of the 6 profiles? Leave us a comment below.

Why create a virtual scientific library

We live in the era of information. Nowadays you can find information about anything on the internet. Just type it into google and you have the answer.

Well, this doesn’t always work like that.

First, on the internet, there is a lot of information useful and useless all mixed up. And second, the internet is full of first steps, general advice, and beginner content, but when you know the basics and want to go deeper, high-quality content is harder to find.

Once you pass the amateur threshold and go to the advanced level, google is not enough to find distilled information on highly specific topics. You better start to collect and organize the sources for the moment you need it.

For you

You need to create a filtered database tailored to your specific needs. For this, you should have a system to organize the information around your subject of interest. You have to create your own scientific library.

This library to be effective has to be a process that serves your needs and grow with you, not a library that someone else built.

Your work and your interests don’t fit in a single discipline. As you move forward in your studying path, you use information from different fields to combine it and give it a new perspective. That’s why you can’t take an already built library because there would be things you don’t need and things that are missing.

The goal of building a library around your interests with a system is to serve you and your potential needs so that a little work today will save you a lot of work in the future.

Virtual

Besides, your library has to be virtual.

In our current life, we are constantly moving. We work in different places. We work on the fly.

That means, we cannot carry all the papers and books we need with us all the time. Having everything in the cloud gives us the freedom to access it at any time. Even, in the middle of a meeting.

The virtual support also opens up all the malleability of the software tools, such as searchability, connectivity, shareability…

Goal

This is the power of your virtual scientific library. You don’t just collect raw scientific data. You distill information, associate it, and interpret it, to get it ready to apply to your work and life.

The idea of creating your virtual scientific library is to convert scientific data in handy applicable knowledge.

The profiles who leverage the most from building their own scientific library are: content creators, R&D professionals, advisors, data-driven decision-makers, people interested in very specific topics, undergraduates, PhD candidates, and scientists.

Stay tuned.

Tell us

Do you have a system to organize your papers? Do you still print articles or do you have at least your most read references in the cloud?

Let us your answer in the comments.

Science News: media vs real world

If you are like most of the people probably you have read the science section of a newspaper or a magazine, but rarely you have read a scientific study.

This is normal. The science and technology section in the media is amusing. It makes us feel smarter. However, scientific studies are not so reader-friendly and certainly do not make you feel smarter.

Media science

Science News in the media may make scientific discussions enjoyable and interesting as general knowledge, but they are not useful for professional use.

The problem is that more often than not, the engaging magazine/TV version transforms the factual scientific jargon in an optimistic juicy interpretation, leading easily the reader to a misinterpretation of the actual results of the study.

Of course, everybody wants to hear that we have found a cure for cancer, but scientific advances are usually more modest. Many small studies in the same direction are necessary to get a breakthrough discovery.

A good example of how the scientific studies are communicated in mainstream media is explained in this show of John Oliver. This hilarious and at the same time sadly true episode explains the distance between the headlines and the actual scientific results.

Real science

Scientific studies are dense to read. Full of technical details. They are not stand-alone sources. You need previous knowledge in the field to understand the issue.

But scientific literature has a specific structure too. The communication follows basic rules which are easy to learn. And once you understand them, you can process the information better.

In this blog, I aim to explain to you how to deal efficiently with the scientific literature to make it a useful source of information for your projects.

Middle ground

There is a middle ground between juicy media and tough scientific articles, specialized magazines that divulge scientific advances in a precise and pleasant way. Some general examples are:

You should find sources that focus on your field of interest.

Beyond the source

In any case, more important than the source, it is to read science critically. This is a skill that takes time to develop, but some tips help us to be more critical. I recommend you to watch this video from It’s Okey To Be Smart who gives some tricks on how to read science news.

Be skeptical when the article

  • has a question in the headline.
  • is based on a press release.
  • use words like: a study suggests, scientists baffle…
  • do not follow the scientific method.
  • have financial incentives for you to read.
  • use hype vocabulary.
  • is just quoting with no review work behind.
  • use stereotypes or social constructions.

Now it’s your turn

What is your preferred source to read science news?

Let us your answer in comments

Why read science like a scientist

Did you ever wonder where all those “a study says…” come from?

We heard often in the news, on the radio, or on social media, articles saying — “a new study found…” or “scientists have discovered…”

Those words are magic. We automatically trust whatever comes after because the best tool that humans have to understand nature is through science.

Science is amazing. Science is fun, but at the same time, it is extremely complex.

That is why it is important to understand how science works. To have a critical view that allows us to distinguish between information and noise.

I am going to confess to you one thing — I have been working as a scientist for more than 8 years, and scientific work is wearisome.

Do not misinterpret my words. I love to work in science, but scientific work is a trial-error process, exhausting, and often not successful.

Why, then,

Why I propose you to read science like a scientist?

Like everything in life, there is a right time for each thing.

When you are new to a subject and you only want to know what is it about, the worst thing you can do is to read a “paper” (that is how actually scientists call scientific studies), because you will not understand anything. There are better ways to start to navigate a new topic.

However, when you want to deep dive into a specific subject, the basic texts are not enough. Sometimes, for example, after reading several blog posts, Wikipedia articles, or maybe even a youtube video, you reach that point where you realize you know more about the subject than what you find in those texts.

It depends on how seriously you take the topic.

What if…

  • you are trying to create something new, with the latest technologies?
  • you want to become a reference author in your niche?
  • you have to write an essay (a piece of work) and show novelty?
  • you are interested in a narrow topic that is not mainstream, and it is very difficult to find information about?

In this blog, I want to explain to you what are the best sources for all the levels of involvement in a scientific/technical topic. From where to start in a new topic to when it is advisable to go a step further and create your own scientific library.

You will be surprised, how often build your own scientific library could be useful.

Tell us

What topic would you like to read on a scientific level?

Let us your response in the comments and I will recommend you where to start.