Photo by Rémi Menegon

As the summer arrives, you may be thinking about taking some time off, maybe going to the beach to do something about that unhealthy pallor you acquired poring over the literature this past semester. Forget all that. Go buy some Vitamin D and come back inside, because I know exactly how you should spend the summer months. Geeking out with the Mendeley research data, that’s how! Mendeley has data on 85M research papers including who’s writing about what, who’s reading them, and where they’re being published. We want to give you $10001 for doing something really cool with all that data. The big announcement was back in March, applications have been rolling in, and now Amazon has chipped in free AWS credits for everyone taking part, with a big pot of credits for the winner.
(more…)

Above is an image from a talk that I gave earlier this year. As you can see, if I lived decades ago, I could somewhat keep up with all new research that pertained to me. Today though? Forget about it. There is just way too much going on. Even if I consider myself to be in a niche research field, I should still be keeping up with cross-disciplinary material that is relevant to my research. There is just no way to keep up with all of that information. It is information overload.

Ask yourself how you find out what is relevant to you in your research field. Got it? OK, we’ll get back to that, but before we do, ask yourself what percentage of all relevant information are you actually consuming? Let’s look at that figure above in the form of a pie chart to help us answer that question. (more…)