Effectively Managing Your Information & Research Stephen Meyer NCSU Libraries Fellow November 17, 2005

Graduate studies and information Conducting original research requires extensive literature reviews Disparate sources of information Research reports online Journal articles Data sets (personal and collected from outside sources) … The current information world is very fluid Rocks vs. water

A Small Sample of Information Sources Communication w/ colleagues Email & listservs Article collections Database alerts Online searches Library searches ???

Filtering Information Staying current Not forgetting it Staying Current as new research becomes available / is published What I am going to show you are two method to automate this process so that your research processes are smarter. The major issue with staying current is that searching might be fruitless. You could go back and check a database or website for new content periodically, but there is no guarantee that it has been updated, let alone updated with information relevant to your research. Alerting services and syndication work on the model that the information provide should notify you when there relevant content has been updated / added / changed. 2. RefWorks is a citation management tool that the University has licenses for all fac/staff/students. It is free to you and though it takes some time to learn, it will can be a very useful tool for managing your research.

Part I (staying current)

Alerts Traditional automated method for staying current with a research topic Research database: Stores your queries on a topic… New content added to database: If any new articles match the topic saved in your query, the results are emailed to you. “Traditional” should be understood here in terms of the computer world. Think Moore’s law.

Alerts Demo http://www.lib.ncsu.edu/ biomechanics AND adaptive systems AND industr*

My Alert Results

My Alert Results (cont’d)

Alerts drawbacks Need an account for each database Crafting a good alert query takes time Research evolves – your alert queries will need to change as your topic changes

RSS Really Simple Syndication Rich Site Summary OR (doesn’t really matter) OR

More RSS details (somewhat important) Specifies various XML file formats Commonly used for weblogs and news sites Commonly identified on websites by Has sibling formats like ATOM

What does RSS do? (very important) Provide a means by which content from one source can be syndicated in another location by a computer. How? By utilizing XML as a data exchange format for the web…

“The most common use of RSS feeds is incorporation into web sites...” Content Syndication with RSS By Ben Hammersley ............................................... Publisher: O'Reilly Pub Date: March 2003 ISBN: 0-596-00383-8

BLOGS RSS-based Websites So what are RSS based websites? Usually they are blogs…

What is a blog? Short for ‘weblog’ Originally intended to serve as a link log (quite literally a log of ones surfing activities on the web by means of storing links) A very simple content publishing system for the web Once software is installed requires minimal knowledge of HTML to publish online Enables very fast publication through a method known as posting Blogs were born right around the time of Google in the late 90s when people realized that web pages were too numerous to track manually. Instead a little bit of algorithmic organization by computers was called for and people began developing small personal content management systems to manage their bookmarks of useful websites. The last two here are significant because they have a synergistic effect

Web-based Blogging Software

What is a blog? (online publishing as simple as email) A way for family members to bring shame upon your home… The last resort of bad authors everywhere to engage in the most dreary vanity publishing imaginable… publicly accessible journaling A way for undeserving, wannabe journalists to get press passes to national party conventions… I might add to this list “a way to ruin a reputable journalists career…”

Blog Examples (and blog-like examples) Organizations, companies NC State NCSU Libraries W3C Google Magazines & Journals, Newspapers Wired Scientific American News & Observer NY Times According to the Pew Internet & American Life Project in early 2005: 8 million American adults say they have created blogs blog readership jumped 58% in 2004 and now stands at 27% of internet users 5% of internet users say they use RSS aggregators or XML readers to get the news and other information delivered from blogs and content-rich Web sites as it is posted online and 12% of internet users have posted comments or other material on blogs still, 62% of internet users do not know what a blog is. Rainie, L. (2005). The state of blogging (Technology & Media Use. Washington, DC: Pew Internet & American Life Project. Retrieved November 14, 2005.

News Readers Also known as ‘aggregators’ Email-like applications that bring together all of the RSS feeds a person may be monitoring May have extra organizational features such as subject base categories of feeds The second

News Readers (cont’d) There is an implied workflow for a program like this. You might check it periodically, daily if you are a news junkie and would only be alerted about websites that have been updated since the last time you checked. A program like this will typically have setting that could alert your desktop as content is updated. For more information see NC State’s RSS page: http://www.ncsu.edu/rss.html

Scholarly Use of RSS Scholarly databases are beginning to incorporate RSS functionality to their traditional alert services Compendex PubMed Up to this point I have been talking about RSS as exists in its most popular form on the Internet – on news sites and weblogs. However, the point here is to discuss the way that you can use a syndication format like RSS to keep up with your research.

RSS Demo http://www.lib.ncsu.edu/ biomechanics AND adaptive systems AND industr*

The Good, The Bad & The RSS Pros Centralization Bring together feeds from multiple databases to a single aggregator Cons RSS is a new technology Yet another program to learn… Standards & best practices are still being worked out Have not reached widespread adoption

Part II (keeping it organized)

Organizing Citations Collect citations for journal articles, books, and other sources Create bibliographies in a variety of styles Export citations with style formatting (e.g., to MS Word)

Free RefWorks Accounts

share citations with colleagues take notes and store them with the citations search for specific citations or notes keep track of where I found the citation where I can get the fulltext (SFX buttons next to each citation) that I can access it from anywhere with internet access

(Your Research Inputs) (Your Research Output)

Thank you. stephen_meyer@ncsu.edu