• Question: Do you find keeping up to date with other people's discoveries is important? If so, how do you do this?

    Asked by calciumkate to Ben, Jony, Katharine, Mark, Peter on 22 Nov 2011.
    • Photo: Katharine Schofield

      Katharine Schofield answered on 22 Nov 2011:

      Hi calciumkate. Yes this is really important to me, even though I am not an active researcher anymore. Because I work in the funding/policy side it is really important to keep up to date with what’s going on in research. I don’t need to know every discovery in detail, breadth of knowledge is more important than depth nowadays – I certainly don’t claim to be a specialist in anything (well, except funding and policy…)! When I was in research doing my phd it was the other way around – I needed a lot more in-depth knowledge about a very specific area. Seeing the ‘bigger picture’ was always really interesting to me so I am very lucky to have a job that lets me do that. There are lots of different ways I keep up to date about things – I read a few science blogs, although if someone in one of my areas makes a new breakthrough they either tell me or our press office about it. I do feel I’m in a privileged position in that respect.

    • Photo: Ben Still

      Ben Still answered on 22 Nov 2011:

      Really important – especially in fields similar to my own. I get an rss feed of papers that are submitted to http://arxiv.org/ , which is where academics send papers before they are published in Journals. I also attend conferences, seminars and regular meetings both within and outside of my experiment. E-mail lists are also a good way of other scientists telling you what they are up to, more recently I have found that Facebook and Twitter are also good points to find the latest breaking news.

    • Photo: Jony Hudson

      Jony Hudson answered on 22 Nov 2011:

      Yeah, it’s really important to keep up with other people’s work. Both because they are the people you are competing against, and because if you don’t keep up then you’ll just end up repeating what they did!

      There are lots of scientific journals that publish results in my field, and I try to look through the most important ones every week (usually on Friday afternoon when I’m tired!). We also invite people from all over the world to come and give a lecture (called a seminar) to us. When they visit we usually spend the day showing them round all of the labs, so we get a chance to talk to them a lot.

      I also go to conferences where you get to meet up with most of the people who are working on similar problems. They are really useful for learning what’s going on, and getting to talk face-to-face with people who’s work you’ve read about.

      And then finally, I get invited to give talks to people and visit their labs.

      So, yes, a lot of keeping up to date 🙂

    • Photo: Mark Basham

      Mark Basham answered on 22 Nov 2011:

      Hi calciumkate,

      Yep, for me its really important to keep up to date as I work between fields, and sometimes new methods which have been developed in computer science can be used for solving some of the Physical or experimental problems or data.

      I don’t get much of a chance to read papers, so most of my information comes from conferences and workshops, and I try to get to at least one or two a year.

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