Sounds a bit like an Indiana Jones title, eh? Can’t be worse than the last offering. Where did it all go wrong, Lucas? Well, Richard’s recent comments on keeping up with the literature after slacking travelling or holidaying have inspired me to write my first post of 20090, on a topic that troubles me from time-to-time.
Beyond simply keeping up with the Joneses’s current literature, how can (relatively) young scientists hope to get to grips with all the old literature on top of that? I picture this problem as an upside down pyramid sometimes:
More obscura than camera.
(Thanks to the people at Precinemahistory. You can also research upside down pyramids here apparently.)
Sure, text books, review papers and supervisors are all valuable resources that point us to the important classics when we initiate our research career, but I still find papers from the 70’s that I should probably have known about before submitting a paper on almost the same thing. In fact, I had a paper reviewed 5 times (not including the subject editor) before it finally ended up at a senior researcher’s desk, where he kindly pointed out he’d thought about this topic over 30 years ago1. None of the other “experts” mentioned this vital work. It has been cited 140 times. How did we all miss that?
This problem may vary in intensity between different fields – the more recently the field you’re working in has been developed, the easier it is to reach the basal point. Perhaps. However, reinventing the wheel is likely to be a common occurrence in the literature, perhaps more common than we’d like to admit.
I’m working in a field (theoretical population ecology) that’s been around for at least 180 years (from the Verhulst equation for logistic growth2) or more. I use some mathematics to do this, which has been around a little longer.
A Beta release of the iPhone scientific calculator
That basically means I’ve got a lot of reading to do! (Yet, I still somehow find time to blog…) While I’m scrabbling around on the large, upper surface of my pyramid, trying to sort through wheat, chaff and other unmentionables, the surface keeps increasing in area. And I still have to find time to thoroughly investigate things below the surface. Although, now I’ve got my PADI certificate, that might at least be more fun, if not easier.
How many spines does a nine-spined stickleback have?
The art of refining literature searches on Web of Science= or other scholarly search engines is a fine one indeed. Anyone have useful paint by number alternatives? Or maybe I should just get back to my simulations and stop worrying about what everyone else thinks they’ve said already.
