Keeping up with the Jones

Keeping up with current literature is difficult at best. I will present this fall on ways to keep up with literature searches, automating the process and writing about the literature you find. The problems are muli-fold:

• finding relevant literature
• preparing to read and reread
• storing and accessing articles
• organizing knowledge

To "keep up with the Jones's", I suggest three simple tasks to get you started:

1.) Create a pubcrawler account and let it do the walking. Pubcrawler is like an RSS feed for pubmed. It repeatedly searches pubmed for terms and e-mails you the results daily/weekly. Consider the following search terms to get you started:

• Keyword based - selection [All Fields] AND nucleic acid [All Fields] AND aptamer [All Fields]
• Common author based - Ellington AD [Author] OR Yingfu Li [Author] OR Sullenger BA [Author] OR Gorenstein DG [Author] OR Keefe AD [Author] OR Famulok M [Author] OR Mayer G [Author] OR Blind M [Author] OR Rossi J [Author]

2.) Get a PDF organizer and use it. PDFs are the future. Organization and recall is the key. Some common ones are:

• Mendeley - cross platform, free, performs reference formatting and inline citing
• Papers -Mac only, $, has plugin to send web pdf files directly to Papers
• Zotero - cross platform browser based (firefox), free, but can perform like Endnote/Mendeley
• Endnote - cross platform, performs cite while you write, $$$

3.) Read and keep notes. Use Google docs, Google notebook or this blog to keep yourself organized with the relevant literature you are finding.