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Taming the Literature

How Does Peer Review in Science Work? 

If you’re unsure as to how the peer-review process works, the difference between open and double-blind peer review or are wondering if peer review is broken, read on.

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18+ Ways to Improve your PubMed Searches

Are you getting the most out of your PubMed searches or are you wasting lots of time slogging through pages of results? We’ve compiled some top tips to help you refine your searches.

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How to get Organised With Reference Managers for Science- Papers

My previous posts on reference mangers have discussed Mendeley and ReadCube. Today I will be discussing Papers, the reference manager I first encountered and the one favoured by many academics, including my PhD supervisor. For anyone who is a fan of Apple products, Papers is likely to be the software you are most familiar with.…

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How Not to Miss (Almost) Any Article on PubMed

Reading papers (still) remains the standard way to follow advances in our field(s), to track our collaborators/competitors, or to enjoy some digressive but scientifically entertaining moments. As scientists, we read all the time. However, reading can become a highly chronophagic activity, especially when we need to perform experiments, attend conferences and write grant applications at…

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How Text-Mining Tools Can Improve Your Literature Searches

Before starting any new research project, it’s essential that you have as complete an understanding as possible of the current research literature. Knowing what other people have done will prevent you from duplicating existing work, and will perhaps indicate under-explored niches. If you work in the same subject area over a number of years, you…

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Using GoogleDocs to Write Collaborative Research Papers

When it comes to writing up a research paper, there are many ways to go about it. If it’s just you doing most of the writing, with your supervisor, it is quite straightforward – you can just maintain a single copy of the document and exchange it by email. Software like Microsoft Word can track…

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Reading Papers On-Screen

Reading papers on-screen is not something that everyone likes but if you can get used to it, it will help save you time and paper and make filing your literature a breeze. If you use a wide flatscreen monitor, something that is 17inch or bigger, then this tip could make your on-screen reading more pleasurable.…

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Why You Should Never Trust a Patent

If you search the literature using a comprehensive search engine like Google Scholar, you will get several types of articles listed. Most of them are peer reviewed journal articles and many are patents. But beware of an important distinction between the two: Although patents can contain useful information, they are not authoritative because they are not…

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Open Access to Science

The Public Library of Science (PLoS) defines the issue of Open Access Publication as: An Open Access Publication[1] is one that meets the following two conditions: 1. The author(s) and copyright holder(s) grant(s) to all users a free, irrevocable, worldwide, perpetual right of access to, and a license to copy, use, distribute, transmit and display…

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