Yesterday I wrote about my quest to find good ways of reading the articles and other content I need for my research, and talked about the two tools Flipboard and Pocket that can make this a bit easier.
The next thing I’m looking for is a way to discover the papers and articles that I should be reading but just don’t know about. At the moment I do this manually by subscribing to journals and news services that I then flip through with Flipboard to find something interesting.
The tool that I’m looking at now for discovering new content is Mendeley. I first started using this software when I wanted to synchronise my whole library of PDFs on a number of Macs, PCs, iPads etc. It’s a pretty good library and bibliography package, but not as good in my opinion as my favourite, Papers. One thing that Mendeley does offer, though, is a kind of scientific social network. You can create interest groups for a particular research topic, and share what papers you are reading, and find out what other people are reading in the same area. This seems to be just what I was looking for!
But this brings me to my question: can scientists be social? Although scientists are often early adopters and innovators of technology and communications, I still find it hard to find comments in my particular research field on Twitter or in blogs. I don’t know whether it’s because everyone’s too busy for such things, or worried about patents or intellectual property, or sees some separation between social media and work, or there could be a host of other reasons. But I find that on Mendeley, there aren’t many people talking about the things that interest me. Maybe I should just start the conversation and see who joins in?