Academiclog

How do you find academic papers of interest?

Keywords: research papers, search, tools

I'm currently in what I'll call an "exploration" phase of my research. I have a number of ideas percolating in the back of my head, but since I'll be committing to a thesis topic sometime soonish, I'd like to take a bit of extra time to explore a broader base of ideas and see if something more compelling emerges.

Today, I was doing a bit of academic surfing -- trying to find papers without having a specific topic in mind, just some broader research areas -- and I got to thinking about how we find information of interest. How do people find papers of interest to them?

To summarize what I do, here's a list in no particular order:
For specific searches:

• Web search engines (eg Google)
  
• Academic search engines (eg Citeseer)
  
• Information sites (eg Wikipedia)
  
• Reading papers cited by ones I found interesting
  
• Reading papers that cite ones I found interesting
  

For more general topics of interest:

• Checking bibliographies
  
• Looking up colleagues'' web footprints (their personal webpages, papers that mention their names, you name it)
  
• Asking colleagues what they've seen of interest
  
• Conference proceedings
  
• Following along from one point of interest
  

When I'm searching for a particular subject, it can be fairly easy to find papers. A few keywords in Google is usually the place to start, since then I can researchers' personal pages which are often very handy (note to self: my own academic page is just a listing of papers, and it wasn't even up-to-date until a few minutes ago when I looked at it and noticed. I'll have to do more work on that.), as well as links to papers. The problem with Google as an academic search tool is well-known, however: it is difficult to tell at a glance which papers come from reputable, peer-reviewed sources, and which ones are just random term papers put online by students or professors, or random essays written by the internet's plethora of know-it-alls.

This is not to say that non-refereed papers aren't useful. I've found that on occasion they provide excellent summaries of work, and those simple overviews often help me figure out where to keep looking. In addition, their bibliographies can provide a wealth of useful citations for further reading on a subject. Of course, they can be completely useless or, worse, incorrect or misleading. That's true of anything you read, though.

Of similar value is Wikipedia. Although the entries themselves have to be taken with a grain of salt, they often contain beautiful plain-language summaries as well as links to useful readings and researchers of note. Similarly, any site that collects links and summarizes information can be handy. I'll admit that even about.com has been known to help me find things.

If I'm looking for more of a pure academic work then I'll switch to something like the venerable Citeseer. Because Citeseer seems to have had a lot of issues with slowness and downtime in the past year, I'll occasionally bite my tongue and use the more questionable Google Scholar. (I could write a whole essay on what I like and don't like about Google scholar, but that is for another time.)

However, all of these things work better when I have a fairly specific subject in mind. For today, I was looking for "recent papers that might be of interest to me" -- pretty broad, and although there's some fascinating work on AI agents to handle "of interest to me" (mental note: look for more papers on that subject), currently I can't just type that into a search engine.

So what do I do then?

I started by looking up a bibliography that's maintained on my specific field, artificial immune systems. (AIS bibliography) It doesn't seem to contain my latest paper, even though it was published in the artificial immune systems conference this summer, but who am I to complain when I hadn't even listed it on my website until today?

I also went and looked up some academic colleagues. The people who I've met and enjoyed conversations with at conferences are likely to have other interesting papers, or links of interest on their websites. One even had a slightly old reading list which I'm poking through at the moment. (He also studies methods for finding documents of interest to people. Maybe I should be trying his software.)

When I'm on campus, I'll sometimes just stop by and talk to people and ask if they've read anything interesting lately. Sometimes, people have excellent recommendations, and the ensuing discussion is always fun. Access to so many smart, interesting people who have time to discuss research interests is one of the major perks of university affiliation. Not that my coworkers in other jobs haven't been smart and interesting, but for programming coworkers, chatting about research tended to be outside the job description, whereas even busy profs can make time to discuss things because that *is* part of their jobs.

I can check out conference proceedings themselves for papers of interest. The last conference I went to had all sorts of interesting presentations and I haven't followed up by reading all of the related papers, and there are of course plenty of interesting conferences I haven't gotten to of late.

And, of course, once I find one source of interest, I follow through on all those things I discussed earlier: look up the author(s), read papers in the bibliography or papers that cite this one, check out other papers at the same conference/journal, etc.

So, those are some of the things that work for me, from an academic perspective. How do other people find things to read?

posted by T @ 4:31 PM