Keeping up on the journals
As scientists, we have to keep up with new research coming out and follow the journals. We all have our preferred way of doing so though. Sporadic searches on Pubmed are one way, or weekly email updates on specific search terms (also offered by Pubmed) are another. Alternatively, there’s Hubmed for RSS of Pubmed updates, and many more options besides.
Using search terms narrows your attention however, so I prefer simply browsing around my favorite journals online. I get a broader sampling of current research that way - which may not be of concern for the average scientist, but for a blogger, it’s often more productive for finding topics to blog on in the peer-review literature.
Some of my favorite journals, below the fold (feel free to add to the list in the comments!):
Science and Nature, as the obvious two.
Unfortunately, while these are great journals, they’re not all Open Access. Of those listed, only PLoS Biology and Nucleic Acids Research are OA, which is troubling. All of those great articles, locked away from all those without an institutional subscription (or $30 per article).
molecular biology
Wow, I hadn’t heard of Hubmed. Very elegant. Have you seen that you can get RSS feeds from Pubmed also? It’s definitely harder to set up, but the links bring you directly to the Pubmed article page.
Yeah, Hubmed is nice and clean, and I use the batch citation matcher often, because it’s so much easier to use with a cut and paste list than NCBI’s.
The guy behind it, Alf Eaton, is now working at Nature, on Scintilla.
[...] to sites that don’t really contribute to my knowledge and take up Dan’s suggestion to use Hubmed to focus and streamline my literature coverage. I am also thinking about learning to [...]