You’re a scientist
with an e-mail account and you use Google scholar and maybe Dropbox, but you do
not use the Internet for research beyond that. If this is you – read on, this
guide is for you! If you already use forums, blogs and know that Python starts
indexing at 0 you may move along, unless you feel extra nice today and might
point out some things that I missed here - which is most likely the case. After
all I did not attend the “internet for professionals” - course since there is
no such thing. As our chancellor Angela Merkel pointed out so well “the
internet is new territory for all of us”. Everyone is trying to figure out how
to use it in a productive way now. I am a biologist - in my university studies,
I learned nothing about electronics, programming or communicating on the
internet. These skills, however, are very helpful when I do electrophysiology, data
analysis or think about new experiments that need novel machines. There are many
aspects about the internet that can be useful; communication, data storage,
literature search, cloud computing, citizen science, publishing (beyond a
paper) and so on. Today I want to give you a few starting points towards as to how
to get in contact with people and communities
that are involved with a certain topic.
First
I must point out that the most important thing to learn is to use Google or any
other search engine. Just use them, you will be surprised how advanced they
already are. They want you to find what you are looking for. You can talk to
them pretty much like you would talk to people. Search “the movie with Bruce Willis
at the tower”. You know what movie I mean, and so does Google. Do you have
computer troubles? Search for the error message/code. You may think that the
particular question you have is very unique and special to your project, but
chances are quite good that someone somewhere had a similar question and posted
it already. This way, I find solutions for research questions and computer/ programming
problems in nine out of ten cases.
But
how can you get answers to questions you may have, that nobody in your reach
can answer and even a Google search won’t answer? For example, a few years ago
I wanted to know if it was possible to do microscopy though a fiber optic. I
wanted to do calcium image with a freely running insect, so I needed a super
thin fiber optic that is a about a meter long. The question was, how thin can a
fiberglass be and still transport the light of the desired wavelength? And more
importantly, is something like this even available?
I asked Google with no
result, mostly because I didn’t know the nomenclature of the field. This is
often a strong obstacle in interdisciplinary. You want to see quickly how
something works “over there” (meaning another research field or discipline) and
you won’t find out because of differences in language. One very new way of
approaching this is using knowledge maps. On openknowledgemaps.org you type in
the topic you are interested in and it will show you a large number of relevant
research articles sorted into bubbles. These bubbles show the shared subset of
topics you can then explore. A different and in many ways complementary
platform that I frequently use is reddit.com. Reddit works like a big forum,
but it is not specific to one topic. It has channels (called subreddits or subs for short) about everything: cat pictures, memes, science,
engineering, … seriously, everything! I went into the sub askengineers and just asked my question. Within six hours I had
answers from four different people, all working in material sciences; one was
even doing research on how thin a fiber can be and still keep the light in. It can
be hard to get started there, but just get an account, search for subs that are
related to your field and your interest and add them to my subreddits (see image below) - your frontpage will magically be
filled with all the stuff you are interested in.
 |
| Screenshot of the AskEngeneers subreddit: here you can see the most recently discussed posts on the left. You can search with in this sub (upper red arrow), post your own question (middle red arrow) and, if you find this sub interesting subscribe (lower red arrow) to this sub. Posts from this sub will be part of your personal landing page then. |
There are two main types
of posts: content posts and self posts. With content I mean that the
post will point to an external article, blog post, video or picture. In the
post itself, the content will be discussed, questions asked (and hopefully
answered) and so on. The other type of posts are self posts, they consist of a title and maybe some extra text. Their
purpose is more often than not to ask the people of that sub. All posts in the
screenshot are self posts. You will be surprised how much fun it is to talk to
specialists all over the world about their fields. Reddit can be used to ask
questions about source code as well (usually “why does it not run”); but you
have better chances at stackexchange.com. Stackexchange is a site that is
mainly used to ask and answer questions. It hosts many communities that share
all kind of interests and knowledge. Besides stackexchange.com there is
stackoverflow.com, it is purely about programmers questions.
Before you turn to stackoverflow
for your code problems please google them. Always do that. If you ask a
question that can easily be answered with a simple web search, the people of
the internet will be annoyed. Otherwise they are a friendly bunch, at least in
my experience.
You can also ask your
question in the Q&A section at researchgate.net, there is a surprising
amount of traffic. I like ResearchGate in general; it is like Facebook for
scientists. You can connect to your peers, keep in contact with people you met
at conferences and stay up to date. The articles the system suggests according
to user interests are really good! Give it a try, or not, but certainly give
reddit a chance: it will change your work-related communication with strangers.
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