How do you keep up with trends in your field?

[Jvcxk]

Short of subscribing to a bunch of professional journals, how do you stay on top of trends, directions, and the latest news in your field?

Do you just search recent articles through databases, follow particular researchers?

[anthropologygeek]

Be a member to a lot of organization and read the monthly journals

[BeingThere]

For I/O psychology, I regularly look through the SIOP website (SIOP is the professional organization for I/O).  Members also receive a monthly small journal which highlights various aspects of the field, but not necessarily research trends.  I also subscribe to the Journal of Applied Psychology.  APA student members get a significant discount on journal subscriptions.

 

I have heard that conference attendance in your area of interest is also probably a really good idea, if at all possible.   

[+Whiskey]

I read journals, the Observer, follow the APA and APS on facebook and visit lab websites of places I want to attend. 

[TakeruK]

I also subscribe to the Journal of Applied Psychology.  APA student members get a significant discount on journal subscriptions.

 

Can't you just access these journals through your school library's subscription? Being a student / junior member of your field's national organization is a great idea, sure, but I don't think I've met anyone (students or professors) that have their own personal subscription to a journal (as far as I know).

[Usmivka]

RSS feeds. Much easier than reading through full journals, I can pinpoint what I'm interested in, read a brief summary and analysis, and download the related paper through the library system to read later. This has the added benefit of highlighting what others are reading and focusing on in your sub-field.

[BeingThere]

Can't you just access these journals through your school library's subscription? Being a student / junior member of your field's national organization is a great idea, sure, but I don't think I've met anyone (students or professors) that have their own personal subscription to a journal (as far as I know).

 

Nice to meet you.  :-)

 

And yes, one can do that.  My school does not get the print versions of that journal, but has the articles through EBSCO. Personally, I prefer to have the whole journal. 

Edited January 13, 2013 by Bren2014

[TakeruK]

Nice to meet you.  :-)

 

And yes, one can do that.  My school does not get the print versions of that journal, but has the articles through EBSCO. Personally, I prefer to have the whole journal. 

You, too!

 

I don't mean to be interrogating, but just curious! I still don't understand the advantage of having your own subscription instead of using the school subscription! For example, I can also see the whole journal of e.g. Icarus, a planetary sciences journal, by going to the journal's website. For example: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/journal/00191035/222/1 I basically get the table of contents for any issue I want and clicking on the the article gives me the PDF. 

 

But to also add to the discussion, I find that "journals club" type meetings are very helpful to keep me up to date! Sometimes they are a formal class and other times, they are just informal gatherings of people with similar interests and we discuss the latest articles. A diverse group could be good or bad -- diversity allows you to be exposed to work in other sub-fields but still in your area of expertise and also allow you to hear interpretations from others outside of your topic. A weekly meeting with students, post-docs and/or faculty is pretty helpful. Sometimes you can do "virtual" journals club, for example, this website: http://astrobites.com/ is run by astronomy graduate students and they summarize very recent astronomical publications (for an undergrad level audience). Sometimes the journal club discussion can just be the "table of contents" of the latest issue of Journal X, which helps determine which articles are interesting enough to spend your time reading.

 

Another way I keep up in my field is to use pre-print servers. http://arxiv.org/ is the popular one for some fields (mostly physics and astronomy) and people tend to upload their articles once they are "in press", so we no longer have to wait for the slow publication process to finish. Sometimes people upload materials prior to submission in order to get comments too. There is no real peer-review though, but it's easy enough to pick out the articles that are immediately interesting to your field. 

 

I know this is in the Psychology sub-forum and that my links refer to astronomy articles but hopefully the ideas of these methods are transferable to some equivalent website/service in everyone else's fields. And if not, starting something like a graduate student journals club meeting is probably not too hard to do at your own department

[BeingThere]

You, too!

 

I don't mean to be interrogating, but just curious! I still don't understand the advantage of having your own subscription instead of using the school subscription! For example, I can also see the whole journal of e.g. Icarus, a planetary sciences journal, by going to the journal's website. For example: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/journal/00191035/222/1 I basically get the table of contents for any issue I want and clicking on the the article gives me the PDF. 

 

But to also add to the discussion, I find that "journals club" type meetings are very helpful to keep me up to date! Sometimes they are a formal class and other times, they are just informal gatherings of people with similar interests and we discuss the latest articles. A diverse group could be good or bad -- diversity allows you to be exposed to work in other sub-fields but still in your area of expertise and also allow you to hear interpretations from others outside of your topic. A weekly meeting with students, post-docs and/or faculty is pretty helpful. Sometimes you can do "virtual" journals club, for example, this website: http://astrobites.com/ is run by astronomy graduate students and they summarize very recent astronomical publications (for an undergrad level audience). Sometimes the journal club discussion can just be the "table of contents" of the latest issue of Journal X, which helps determine which articles are interesting enough to spend your time reading.

 

Another way I keep up in my field is to use pre-print servers. http://arxiv.org/ is the popular one for some fields (mostly physics and astronomy) and people tend to upload their articles once they are "in press", so we no longer have to wait for the slow publication process to finish. Sometimes people upload materials prior to submission in order to get comments too. There is no real peer-review though, but it's easy enough to pick out the articles that are immediately interesting to your field. 

 

I know this is in the Psychology sub-forum and that my links refer to astronomy articles but hopefully the ideas of these methods are transferable to some equivalent website/service in everyone else's fields. And if not, starting something like a graduate student journals club meeting is probably not too hard to do at your own department

TakeruK,

 

I do not find the same access for Journal of Applied Psychology that you enjoy for Icarus.  I don't know whether psychology journals are more proprietary or if I am just not adept at finding access.  I get the impression that journals published by APA are not available online unless one subscribes to the journal (and pays.)  I do have access to any articles for any journal that my school has through EBSCO, but that does not include every journal under the sun (see how I cleverly slipped in the astronomical reference? ;-))

 

I like the idea of a journals club.  And an interdisciplinary one within the various fields of psychology would be fantastic!  As an I/O, I am often reading articles from other psychology sub-fields.  For instance, social and personality psychology greatly inform a lot of work in I/O.  As a part-time student, I dream of having enough on-campus time to create a club like this. 

[TakeruK]

TakeruK,

 

I do not find the same access for Journal of Applied Psychology that you enjoy for Icarus.  I don't know whether psychology journals are more proprietary or if I am just not adept at finding access.  I get the impression that journals published by APA are not available online unless one subscribes to the journal (and pays.)  I do have access to any articles for any journal that my school has through EBSCO, but that does not include every journal under the sun (see how I cleverly slipped in the astronomical reference? ;-))

 

I like the idea of a journals club.  And an interdisciplinary one within the various fields of psychology would be fantastic!  As an I/O, I am often reading articles from other psychology sub-fields.  For instance, social and personality psychology greatly inform a lot of work in I/O.  As a part-time student, I dream of having enough on-campus time to create a club like this. 

 

Icarus is a similar type of journal -- it's published by the Division of Planetary Science, which is a subset of the American Astronomical Society, which is the astronomy equivalent of the APA! I tried to find the similar page for the Journal of Applied Psychology and I ended up here:

 

http://psycnet.apa.org/index.cfm?fa=browsePA.volumes&jcode=apl

 

That page shows "purchase PDF" links instead of "view PDF" but if I am on my school's VPN (or using a school computer), then I can view all the articles for free due to the subscription! Hope it is helpful! 

 

When you access the journal through your school's library, APA is indeed "paid" by the way -- the school pays the subscription fees for all its students (one of the perks of being affiliated to a school and arguably one of the reasons why you pay tuition and fees). Of course, they pay some flat rate for access by all its members so it's much more economical than buying each paper individually or even subscribing individually!

[BeingThere]

Icarus is a similar type of journal -- it's published by the Division of Planetary Science, which is a subset of the American Astronomical Society, which is the astronomy equivalent of the APA! I tried to find the similar page for the Journal of Applied Psychology and I ended up here:

 

http://psycnet.apa.org/index.cfm?fa=browsePA.volumes&jcode=apl

 

That page shows "purchase PDF" links instead of "view PDF" but if I am on my school's VPN (or using a school computer), then I can view all the articles for free due to the subscription! Hope it is helpful! 

 

When you access the journal through your school's library, APA is indeed "paid" by the way -- the school pays the subscription fees for all its students (one of the perks of being affiliated to a school and arguably one of the reasons why you pay tuition and fees). Of course, they pay some flat rate for access by all its members so it's much more economical than buying each paper individually or even subscribing individually!

Yes, TakeruK, this is what I said in an earlier post when I said I do have access to any articles from any journal that my school has through EBSCO (which is the "server", I think, for systems like psychINFO, etc).  And, yes, I access that through my school library site.  I thought you were saying you just accessed your journals (e.g. Icarus) through the web without going through a host. 

 

I have been miscommunicating quite a bit lately.  It's me, not you.

 

Also, having the online articles is, qualitatively, not the same to me.  I prefer the print journal.  I can't afford to personally subscribe to every journal, so I just subscribe to the one most consistently relevant for me. 

[TakeruK]

Ah, sorry for saying blatantly obvious things then! haha! I do understand where you're coming from when you say print journals are preferable to online articles though. I find it pretty hard to take good notes, even with things like Mendeley, so I find myself printing out articles that are very important to my research and putting it in a binder. I don't think we have software that makes annotations on the screen feel as natural as writing notes in the margin -- not yet anyways!

[nessa]

RSS feeds. Much easier than reading through full journals, I can pinpoint what I'm interested in, read a brief summary and analysis, and download the related paper through the library system to read later. This has the added benefit of highlighting what others are reading and focusing on in your sub-field.

this. I have all the major journals in my field subscribed to with google reader. I skim through the feed when I need a break in lab and read any papers whose abstracts look interesting. It can get a little overwhelming with journals like PNAS that have a ton of articles but it's the most efficient way I've found. You can also set up alerts for certain authors or for topics with google scholar, although I haven't tried that.