Staying on top of research
Why & When
As an aspiring scientist, it is important to follow the current discussions in science. Staying on top of research is an essential skill that will enhance your science game significantly. Because that's the gist: There is more to science than searching for terms in Google Scholar.
Ultimately, you want to:
- identify key papers that are relevant for your research and read the papers that cite these key papers
- identify key authors in your field and follow whatever they publish next
- identify key journals in your field that have a high rating (so are being cited frequently) and therefore publish the most important news in your field
The Beginner Level
You have just started out with your study program and want to understand research as such. You may have recently found out that journals exist and that journal ratings are a thing. On this level, you could follow:
- The journals "Nature" and "Science" are the "BILD" newspaper of science. They tend to have rather sensational titles, feature mostly short papers but also report the main news. (Now that I think about it, they are probably a bit better than BILD, but that's just on the side.)
- ...
The Advanced Level
You've understood the game of science and have written your first few papers for your degree program. This means you levelled up! Now it's time to follow some general resources in your field.
These resources can be very influential authors and journals. For Computer Science disciplines, you'll also find that conferences play a major role as new results get published faster. This being said, for Machine Learning, the following resources are important:
- International Conference of Machine Learning (ICML)
- NeurIPS Conference
- Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining Conference (KDD)
- Machine Learning Journal (MLJ)
- Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery (DAMI)
- Journal of Machine Learning Research (JMLR)
The Expert Level
At this stage, you know where you are going in science and have identified your research niche. You want to become an expert in that niche? Well, you need to stay uptodate on a granular level:
how to delete old pictures?!
Different tools allow you to follow the authors, papers and journals you just identified. The following services and apps are your friend:
- Google Scholar Alerts
- Visualping
- Feedly
Where to follow authors
When an author keeps popping up in your research, it might be a good idea to follow their current work. Depending on where they are present, you have different ways to do so:
- Google Scholar: find the author's Google Scholar profile, eg. in this case Ian Goodfellow's. Click on the follow button to receive email alerts whenever he publishes an exciting new paper.
- Visualping: sometimes, authors don't have a Google Scholar profile you can follow or you might be worried not all papers are found by Google Scholar. You can always monitor changes on websites using services like visualping. Find the author's institutional webpage or his private webpage where his or her newest publications are listed.
Identify key papers that are relevant for your research and follow it on Google Scholar so every time someone cites it, you'll get an email alert
Identify key authors in your field and follow them on Google Scholar or track changes on their websites
Identify key journals in your field (ask your professor for journals to follow) and follow them on feedly and/or Google Scholar
Do it as a table?
Links & Further reading
Icons for "Choose Your Level" are designed by lagotdesign and taken from: https://thenounproject.com/lagotdesign/collection/lagotline-science/ The Visualping icon: Salager / CC BY-SA (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)
