Anti-social media

Winter is closing. The primary conference season, here in India, is almost over by now. Conferences are for academic socialisation. You make new contacts, refresh the old ones, exchange email IDs, occasionally discuss science, and obviously do lots of bitching on lack  of research grants, bureaucratic red-tapes, politics of award committees etc. (For those lesser morals, not in academics, I suggest to read Small World: An Academic Romance by David Lodge to get an idea). Whatever it is, conferences in India are lively. They serve good foods and are crowded  and noisy to make you feel living.

Another thing that make you feel living and kicking is social media, from Facebook to Tweeter. These are also social activities, just virtual. Social media is slowly becoming part of academics. Social media can be used to champion popular science, to share ideas and information with fellow scientists. It is an excellent medium to debate over science policies. (If not impressed with my words, you may read this post to know why a scientist should use social media). 

Institutions, across the globe, are now using Tweeter and Facebook to serve their news to a larger audience, including media. Funding agencies also do so. Social media is often used to promote conferences and meetings. Individual researchers post their works. Services like ResearchGate and others are trying to build social networks exclusively for scientists. They are promoting social media to discuss science with all its nuts and bolts. Even then, most of the scientists are still not using these online tools for academics. 

Situation is far grimmer in India. The present government is promoting use of social media to interact with its citizens. But unfortunately, only a handful of academic and research institutes use social media to engage with the public and media. Individual scientists rarely use social media to interact with their peers. Strangely, many young scientists regularly use social media like Facebook, to spam 'cute'  pics of their puppies or to vent opinion on terrorism; but rarely to share their research and science in general. Drop a 140 worded review in tweeter on an exciting paper that you read just now or post a recent popular science article on Facebook. Don't expect a buzz from your colleagues and peers. Rather expect a silence.

Facing some technical trouble in experiment? Post it to ResearchGate. Don't expect an answer from your Indian colleagues. Most of the answers would be from some one abroad. Many of your Indian peers and colleagues are there in ReseachGate and regularly update their publication profiles. But they will rarely engage in peer- discussions and debates there.

It is weird. Science is a social endeavor. Discussions, debates and sharing of information, over a coffee or in the Web, helps one to get enriched. I wonder why then my "Argumentative Indian" colleagues and peers are so silent on the Web. One of my cynic old colleague does have an answer for me though: "your Tweets are not counted at the time of promotion".

How to stay updated with latest literature

When I was doing Ph. D, online publishing of scientific journals had just learned walking. We were more dependent on hard copies of journals in libraries. For many of us, it used to be a ritual to regularly visit the library and flip through the pages of our favorite journals, to catch the new and relevant to our work. But, the Internet has changed the way we access journals now. It has democratized access to knowledge and also overwhelmed us with information. Hundreds of papers get published every day. Though you may have access to most of those, it’s difficult to keep track of papers of interest. Thankfully, there are tools that can help you to keep you informed about the latest literature in your field. 

E-mail alert by PubMed: NCBI PubMed has changed the way we do biomedical research. You must be searching this database at least once every day. Do you know that you can make an personal account with NCBI to save your searches? Visit MyNCBI page to make an account. Log in your account. Perform a search using a keyword suitable for your research. This time you will get a link for "Save Search", near the top of the search results page. Click it. It will take you to a page to save your search result with option to activate email alert for new results on this key word. You can select the frequency of such update. I select to get update daily, so that whenever there is a new paper, I get informed immediately. You can anytime come back to your MyNCBI page and edit your saved searches. The key of this email alert is the key word(s) used for the search. Therefore, you have to be very careful in choosing them. Use different key words and create saved searches for those. Subsequently, based on the email alerts, you may change the keywords. 

Twitter: Do you Tweet. No am not asking you to use Twitter to add spice to your social life. You can use it as a powerful tool to keep updated with what's happening in your field of study. Most of the reputed journals use social media, including Twitter, to spread news about important papers published by those. Even, scientific associations use Twitter to announce breakthrough in specific fields. Even many scientists use regularly Tweet about latest papers published by them and their peers. So join Twitter. Find out Journals and organizations of your interests in Twitter. Start following them. See if any of your peers is there in Twitter. Follow them too. Then make a habit to scroll through the tweets once daily. And don’t be just an observer. Reciprocate. Tweet about your new publication. Tweet about a recent paper that you found interesting. Build a social network around your science. 

Faculty of 1000: This is what you have always dream of. A bunch of experts reading and flagging latest literature for you. Obviously, this does come with a cost. Subscribe to F1000Prime. Choose particular topics of your interest and even experts to follow from the list. F1000 will send you email alerts whenever your experts review a brilliant paper of your interest.  One day, maybe your paper will also get reviewed by F1000 and get the prestigious badge of F1000 in the PubMed. Till then enjoy reading.