RSS & Co.

One of my students asked me how I keep up with conferences and journals.
Here are the resources I use:

RSS feeds
I subscribe to the blogs of a few people in my research area, and to ILPS PhD Resources of course. But I find RSS feeds the most useful for keeping up with journals. Some of the journals I subscribe to are:

• Computational Linguistics, from MIT Press (current issue | RSS feed)
• Information Processing & Management, from Elsevier (current issue | RSS feed). This is the only journal RSS feed that doesn't include article abstracts, which makes it a lot less useful than the other ones.
  
• Information Research, privately published (current issue | RSS feed)
  
• Information Retrieval, from Springer (current issue | RSS feed). I subscribe to a lot of journals from Springer, but I'm too lazy to look up all the links. Here are just the names: "Cognition, Technology & Work", "Computer Supported Cooperative Work", "Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery", "Minds and Machines", "Pattern Analysis and Applications", "User Modeling and User-Adapted Interaction", "World Wide Web".
  
• JASIS&T (Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology),
  from Wiley InterScience (current issue | RSS feed)
• Library Quarterly, from Chicago Journals (current issue | RSS feed)
  

mailing lists
The usefulness of these varies, some mainly have conference announcements, others have lively discussions. I'm not posting the addresses, most of these you can find on the web, or email me.

• Corpora-List
• SIG-IRList
• SIKS (I think people get subscribed to this one when they join the SIKS school)
  
• um (User Modeling, through Yahoo! Groups)
• webir (Yahoo! Groups)
  

Google Calendar
There's a Google calendar called "Information Retrieval & Web Mining Conference Dates". It includes submission deadlines and conference dates. I'm not sure how to create a link to this, but you'll find it if you search for the name in Google's public calendars.

What do you use to keep up with these things? What mailing lists and RSS feeds do you subscribe to?

CiteULike and more

CiteULike is in my opinion probably one of the finest web based tools for doing research. We even have our own group page there, in which you'll find a very broad scope of interests. Another one of my favourites is Diigo, which is a best-of-breed combination of Google Notebook and del.icio.us. It does much the same things as del.icio.us, but with this tool you can also highlight and annotate parts of documents found on the web and keep notes regarding those snippets. These will be stored, such that when you visit the page again, the highlighted sections will immediately stand out. Using their browser plugin/toolbar, you can even simultaneously add links and tags to other tagging software (Simpy, Furl, del.icio.us, Yahoo!, and Connotea to name just a few) and automatically create links in your own local bookmarks folder.

Mastering Your PhD

'Mastering Your PhD' by Gosling and Noordam is a very practical book about various issues you encounter as a PhD, like attending conferences, yearly reviews, and of course thesis writing. Most of the chapters in the book have now been published as articles on the Science Careers website. One of the authors is Dutch and the other is German, it's nice to see a somewhat European slant on things.

Here is a list of the articles published so far. Recommended!

• Starting Off on the Right Foot
• Getting the Most Out of Progress Reviews
• Mentors, Leadership, and Community
• Relating to Your Co-Workers' Personality Types
• Mastering Your PhD: Strength in Numbers
• Mastering Your PhD: Celebrate Your Success
• Mastering Your PhD: Science Papers that Shine
• Making the Most of a Conference
• Dealing With Setbacks
• Group Dynamics
• Setting Goals for Success
• Running in Place
• Giving a Great Presentation