New Ways of Communication and Information Gathering – a point of entry

There are more ways to communicate on the Internet than ever before. These services are getting more and more populated by scientists or even specifically set up for us. They have made my life as a scientist easier, and without a few of them I could not work anymore. To get a general overview of types of services out there, I will give a representative example for each of them.
I am not the first one to come up with the idea to sum up the available tools for scientists. There is a great project I just learned about. At innoscholcomm.silk.co you can interactively browse through over 100 tools / websites in workflow - categories like discovery, analysis, writing, publication, outreach and assessment. It is a great way to introduce oneself to new sites and services.


Forum – reddit.com
reddit is a message board with topics (subreddits) for anything. Most notably:
AskScience – get answers from scientists related to your question. Google twice before asking, they hate boring questions.
AskEngineers – like askScience but with engineers.
AskAcademia – ask people employed in academia career-related questions, about publications, the funding process, work stuff in general.
AMA – (Ask Me Anything) People of interest, for example the NASA team right after a successful mission, answering any type of questions. Often when a scientist publishes something important they do an AMA.
FindaReddit – reddit is overwhelming and confusing in the beginning - here you can ask were you can find a fitting subreddit for your interest.

Blogs - labrigger.com
Blogs supply information on small or negative results and findings that are usually not published. The blog labrigger.com shows helpful tips and hacks to ease the life of an electrophysiologist.


Microblogs – twitter.com
It can be used to follow interesting scientists and their updates, especially when attending conferences and live events.


Social networks – researchgate.net
Get updates on the work of researchers of interest and show your own work. Uploaded posters get a lot more views than the ones only hanging in your lab. By now you can upload anything and chances are you get collaboration out of it. The publications suggested by RG are very fitting.

Data visualization - openknowledgemaps.org
Helps you to find scientific publications in a field you are unfamiliar with. Just have a look at some examples: graphene, CRISPR (fancy genetic tool).

Hardware, software and data collection of open science projects in neuroscience. The resources are described as detailed as necessary to copy them for your own use.


Citizen Science - zooniverse.org
Citizens help with their human computational power to categorize animals, stars, plants and many others. Anyone can create a project and use this tool to get their data analyzed.

Procrastination – youtube.com
There are a lot of youTubers who upload educational videos that are really fun to watch. Some examples:
Two Minute Papers  - Summaries about artificial intelligence papers in just two minutes. They are easy to digest.
Cody’sLab - Experiments about refining metals, mining, chemistry, geology and even bee keeping.
Applied Science - Electron microscopes and a lot of really nerdy experiments in applied science.
EEVblog - Channel of Dave Jones, explaining in great detail any aspect of electronic engineering.

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