One of the things I find hardest about being a scientist is keeping up-to-date with all the latest research. A number of times I’ve worked on some problem for days, weeks and even months before finding out that someone else has already solved the problem!
I’ve started looking to internet tools to help me keep up to date. My favourite two at the moment are Flipboard and Pocket.
Flipboard is an app for iOS and Android that puts all of your news together in a really pretty interface. You can see three or four stories, normally the title, photo and a few lines of text, on each page and flip through it quickly to find things you’re interested in reading. I’ve got it set up to show me updates from Twitter and Facebook as well as science blogs and articles, and news from the UK and China. This way I can keep up-to-date quickly with people and topics that are important to me.
Pocket is a web service for storing articles to read later. It used to be called Read It Later. This is fairly new for me, although I dabbled with Read It Later and competitor Instapaper before, I never really got into them. I started using Safari’s Reading List instead, as this works on my MacBook, iPad and iPhone and keeps my articles in sync. But this doesn’t help with work articles, as my work only has Windows PCs. And it doesn’t play nicely with other apps – I can’t add articles to my Reading List from Flipboard or Twitter. Pocket, on the other hand, isn’t tied to any particular system, as it’s web-based. When I’m flipping through my Flipboard, I can read the odd thing that catches my eye, but if I don’t have the time right then I can send it to Pocket to read later on. Very handy.
My only complaint is that not all feeds work with Flipboard. There are a couple of blogs that I just can’t work out how to add, and in reality this just means I never remember to read them.
Another problem that I haven’t found a good solution to is discovering new things to read – at the moment I scan through blogs and other sources that I know have interesting articles, but how can I make sure I’m not missing articles that are really important? There must be some kind of social solution that shows me what other people in my field are reading – any suggestions?