Efficient Academic

Taking the risk of being a Google fan boy, just came to know that not only Gmail – but Reader also has a notifier!! Ok before you let out a sigh (what’s new?) the notifier allows you specifically monitor tags that you have defined for your subscriptions.Which means that if i want to be notified when a particular tagged subscription in updated, then notifier comes in handy, instead of going to the reader page to check if a particular feed is updated.Also available in a firefox flavour Nifty eh? ;-’) oh if you haven’t seen how useful Google reader please read my previous post (plug!).

I have written previously about how RSS is a revolutionary phenomenon for people who need to process continously updating information sources.If you are in Academia then keeping yourself updated in research publications is a must.Most people including myself used the eTOC (electronic Table of Contents) facility of journals to update what’s getting published.However after RSS came up all that has changed.I have a screencast showing how advantageous it is to go through large list of information with RSS feeds and the mightly google reader

More to Reader:

• great interface
• handy keyboard shortcuts
• Google gears (access RSS feeds offline too!!)
• Share posts from your RSS subscriptions

So give it a try you’ll notice that its much faster than the classical email subscription system

PS: In screencast i show how the feeds can be organized in reader, then quickly ’skimmed’ using the trusty keyboard shortcuts, i usually mark (star) papers/posts that i want to read for later – i also share interesting papers via my shared feed which my friends can view, this way the chances of missing  significant publication very less. Also have subscriptions from my Pubmed searches, from social bookmarking sites like connotea, citeulike etc. again a method to really get everything you are interested in. Yes this will result in a huge inflow of information, which is why i need an interface like Googlereader to go through them in the shortest time possible.

Haven’t posted in a while, held up by work . Just came across a fabulous post from the wonderful lifehack, this time its for Better Research, there’s also one for writing research papers!