Q:As a college student working towards his BS in Cell Biology (with dreams of med school!) what would your advice be to those of us that are terrible at looking up research articles? I can describe Sanger-Coulson sequencing or the isolation of mature mRNA in my sleep but trying to find research articles relevant to what is being worked on in lab (which is one of my assignments this semester for molecular biology) is like asking me to get blood from a stone. Help :(

redneckwithguns

It’s tough to keep up with research publications these days. Even for experienced scientists. As of today, PubMed (the NIH peer-review database) lists 39,832 journals. Obviously most of those are junk, and many are idle, but it’s still too much to keep up with.

Wanna get close? Here’s my methods:

  1. Learn to love Google Scholar. Lots of nontraditional and out of print stuff there in addition to normal journals.
  2. Play around with PubMed. It’s so much more than a simple “type in box, hit enter” search tool. You can save searches as RSS feeds or email alerts, so you know when something new comes out based on a certain search. Also learn to use MeSH terms to narrow your searches.
  3. Star using a social reference manager like Mendeley. You can follow other people in certain fields, synch your papers in the cloud, and use their social tools to discover things you’d never find. They have web, mobile and desktop apps, too.
  4. Understand that you can’t read everything, and never will.

61 Notes/ Hide

  1. newcalicious said: Google Scholar is my best friend.
  2. jukeboxhound said: Also, JStor. You just need to sign into the site through your school library with your student ID number, assuming you don’t want to pay for access.

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