Mission Statement

It's a bit hard to remember how keeping up with research was supposed to go before Google Scholar came along, despite the fairly brief time that it's been a fully developed tool for searching, and chasing forward-references, in the academic literature. Certainly, Google Scholar is much more comprehensive than any more established database like Scopus, and only slightly more noisy (your taste for Scholar probably depends largely on how you feel about the 'grey literature' it tends to include).

Despite worrying signs that Google may be de-emphasising Scholar in its interface, the search tool continues to be developed in interesting new ways. For example, publication and citation pages for individual researchers are now a great way to check a researcher out ‘at a glance’, and to show off to potential employers or other interested parties (examples: my page, or the Logic & Computation Group at ANU where I do my work).

Still, even with with this search engine it can be difficult to know that you're really keeping up with the advances in your field, let alone keeping up with any wider research that may have some serendipitous connection to your work. The new(ish) tool Scholar Updates is designed to help with this. If you have a Google Scholar profile, your papers can essentially be used as a giant search term to look through recent additions to the Scholar database, and those likely to be relevant to you are then compiled in an ever-updating list.

After seeing an enthusiastic user review of Updates, I decided to have a look myself, and was immediately impressed by the page of recent papers, many of which I was not aware of, which for the most part appeared to be highly relevant to my interests. But this a superficial first impression - would regular use of this tool really make me a better and more informed researcher? That calls for an (informal) experiment, and this experiment is this blog.

The rules are simple - every week (give or take) I'll pull the top recommendation from Updates that I have not previously read, write it up briefly on this blog, and comment on its relevance to my interests. I won't be 'reviewing', in the somewhat combative sense that that word takes on in academia, but rather trying to give a quick sense of a paper's contents from my perspective. After a while I'll report on the usefulness of the tool as a working aid to my work, and continue or discontinue the experiment, and the blog, as I see appropriate.

Why make this process public? After all, first and foremost this is about my self-improvement as a researcher, and exploring whether the tool works for me and me alone. One motivation is accountability - if the process is public (even if no one much is reading) I'll be ashamed not to keep to my schedule! The blog may also provide some interest to people interested in the tool, and in particular to those who share my corner of logic and theoretical computer science. If that sounds like you, read on!