My colleagues at the NCCR on the move have created this excellent video on how to get the most out of your conference experience.
academia
Zotero!
If you aren’t, you should be using Zotero. It amazes me to see researchers ‘managing’ their references manually these days. It’s complicated, takes time, is prone to errors, and simply unnecessary. There are many options out there to manage your references, but you should look at the free and open Zotero. You can install it on all your devices, you’re not limited in the number of citations you can use, you can take it with you when you change workplace, and in fact you’re not even restricted to the feature of Zotero because you can use plugins. Seamless integration in word processors isn’t going to stand out from the competition, but getting stuff into Zotero takes no effort at all — it’s unparalleled easy with just one click in your web browser. You get free syncing, too. There really is no reason not to keep notes of what you are reading.
After grabbing Zotero, you probably want Zotfile, too. Zotfile manages your PDF versions of research articles. In my view, the most useful feature is the ability to extract highlighted text from the PDF. It’s so practical that I sometimes even don’t take proper notes (for the main points, you should store them in your brain anyway).
Image credit: Zotero, Zotfile
ORCID Reviewer
I am still waiting for someone to explain me the point of Publons, when I’m starting to get frustrated with academic bean counting. I’ve just submitted a review where I had to declare no conflict of interest, whether I want to have my review acknowledged on Publons, whether I want to have my review acknowledged on ORCID, whether I want to have my name printed in the list of reviewers in the journal, … really?
it’s called research for a reason!
All credits to Gary King for this one. In a forthcoming piece of advice to grad students, we find this gem:
It will require rewriting, recasting your argument, reconceptualizing your theory, recollecting your evidence, remeasuring your variables, or reanalyzing your data. You’ll have to revise more than you want and you thought possible. But try not to get discouraged; they call it research, not search, for a reason!
Excellence by Nonsense
I know it’s 5 years old, but I still think this description of academia deserves a wider audience.
In this chapter, Binswanger (a critic of the current scientific process) explains how artificially staged competitions affect science and how they result in nonsense. An economist himself, Binswanger provides examples from his field and shows how impact factors and publication pressure reduce the quality of scientific publications. Some might know his work and arguments from his book ‘Sinnlose Wettbewerbe’.
Binswanger, Mathias. 2014. ‘Excellence by Nonsense: The Competition for Publications in Modern Science’. In Opening Science: The Evolving Guide on How the Internet Is Changing Research, Collaboration and Scholarly Publishing, edited by Sönke Bartling and Sascha Friesike, 49–72. New York: Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-00026-8_3. [open access]
