Tuesday, June 5, 2007

How do you find science papers to read?

I use a variety of methods to keep me updated on new papers that may be of interest to me, but I am always on the look out for a new tool or method that makes this job easier. Currently, I use the following methods (in order of relevance):
  1. TOC email alert of certain journals (Nature, PLOS, EMBO, etc)
  2. Pubcrawler
  3. myNCBI updates
  4. Papers mentioned in blogs
  5. RSS feed of Connotea groups or similar users
Of course I still have to filter through tons of papers to find ones that I want to read and I often end up missing papers that are not caught by any of these methods. Ideally, it would be great if I had a tool that recorded what I read, and figured out what new articles I would probably be interested in (giving more weight to recently read papers). I think the information from the papers I have bookmarked and tagged in Connotea would be a great starting place for such a tool.

I wonder if anyone else has some tips or tricks that help them filter through the journal haystack?