Wikipedia. Seen as the easiest source of knowledge, but not
the most reliable source. Trusting Wikipedia is like replying to that spam
email in the hope for a million pounds. All the facts maybe there but with
anybody able to add their two cents, take anything new you see with a pinch of
salt until you have confirmed the information with appropriate references.
Conveniently, these references can be found at the end of the article. Where
Wikipedia may lack in reliable content, it makes up for it in a who’s who of citable
authors that will most likely make up a fair chunk of a literature review.
Did you know, there is a history of edits and a discussion
tab for every article? These allow you to revert to previous editions of the
article and see when it was edited. Can be seen as good and bad. Good; being
able to see when changes occurred, can also allow you to see if the page is
evolving in response to the papers and findings being published. Which can also
give the impression of how “popular” a certain topic of research is, if it is
updated on a regular basis. Bad; anonymous posting.
Presentations and podcasts are what I like to call “diet”
versions of academic and review papers. These pieces of media as usually
generated by university professors or subject matter experts (SMEs) in
industry. But they can also be generated by you to display your level of
research progress / knowledge to a wider community. They are perfect to listen or
watch, before or after you read up in-depth on the topic at hand. Before: pick
up key words that are continually being dropped or relevant to your topic.
After: having something explained in a different way (maybe using an analogy)
can very easily trigger your brain allowing your grasp the point at hand. The
best podcasts I have found are the TED talks. Since TED is a global community,
if there is a talk on it then it is most likely a subject of international
global discussion, given by done by an SME who tends to explain very coherently
with recent (to the time of posting) references to the field in question. The
talk on graphene by Mikael Fogelstrom taught me how to explain what graphene is
to the non-scientific community, not just using analogies but explaining it in
a way that the listener realises the answer themselves thereby teaching as
opposed to telling someone what you do.
https://www.ted.com/watch/ted-institute/ted-bcg/mikael-fogelstrom-graphene-from-a-layer-of-atoms-to-applications
- For a brief introduction to graphene
The academic and research community is fortunately very vast
with 1000’s of researchers all over the world looking into topics with some
sort of relevance to what you are doing. One researcher’s lifetime of work may
only have a paragraph or line in a paper relevant to you, but it is essential
to give credit where it is due. Now to manage them all: from the abyss of
papers available to you, a thousand maybe relevant, you may read a hundred,
skim read a hundred more and only need to reference 50 or so. Referencing
software, such as Mendeley, Zotero and Coolwiz keep all these documents in one
place to prevent you pulling you hair out over which documents that one paper
you want went missing into. Personally, I use Mendeley due to its ease of
collating folders, being able to highlight key points and the ease to build
bibliographies into Microsoft Word. Referencing software is something that you
reap what you sow. If you are organised with it form the offset, when it comes
the time to write a report / thesis, the bibliography in some ways will already
be written and any changes to references in the bulk of the document will sort
themselves out, therefore reducing stress on last minute edits. (Which will
inevitably occur!)
.CJ*
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