Recognizing and Responding to Legitimate and Illegitimate Researchers

[neededalj]

On the heels of my two posts on neuroscience, I'm going to try one that's straight-up about research.

Over the course of SurveyFail, I have seen two different attitudes towards researchers that bother me. I am *not* singling anyone out individually over this; I do not think anyone in fandom deserves blame for any of the shit that went down.

Comments

[cnoocy]

Here from linkspam, just wanted to point out that Google Scholar is more comprehensive in some fields than others.

[neededalj]

Duly noted; I should have remembered that myself. I used it all the time for cognitive neuroscience references because most of that literature is so recent that google scholar can almost always turn up what you're looking for, but that changes as you move out towards the social sciences and the humanities. I have added an ETA on the original post noting that there are many useful additional points in the comments.

[neededalj]

You mean you write...with things...that aren't a keyboard? You go looking for things that are only written on...paper?

Heh. I once took a class for which I needed to go locate some older linguistics articles that weren't online (this in and of itself was an oddity) and then imagine my chagrin when I discovered that the linguistic literature was split between TWO libraries (some in the humanities/social science library and some in the straight-up science library) because linguistics has/had split personality disorder when it comes to it's designation. I actually had to *walk* (twice!) to get my references! ;)

[jonquil]

John G. Kemeny (light eternal shine upon him) started arguing for online books *in the 1960s*, inspired by the time he went to the math library, looked up a book, couldn't find it on the shelves, walked back to his office, *and discovered that the colleague next door had it*.

[codeman38]

It's the same way here at UGA, with the two-library setup.

And I'm studying computational linguistics with a psycholinguistic focus, which means there's even more going back and forth between the libraries. I've quickly gotten accustomed to which buses can get between the two as fast as possible.

[codeman38]

Er, somehow when rewording that comment I deleted the mention that the two libraries are 3/4 mile apart.