Poll about Academic/Professional Journals

A few questions regarding ‘reviewing the literature’, or just keeping up on research.

Does anyone still read journals? Or is it more common to just do a database search for the relevant topics and look for specific articles?

If you do read journals, how many do you subscribe to, and how often do you read them? Quarterly, monthly, weekly? Does it depend on the topic?

Somewhat related question, is it even possible to be a ‘generalist’ anymore within your profession or specialty? For example, I am studying accounting, and that quickly branches into about 4 major sub-areas - financial, managerial/cost, auditing, and tax accounting. It also breaks down according to type of organization - government, non-profit, corporate, small business, etc.

I doubt anyone can be a ‘general’ accountant - the field is too vast. You pick your specialty and go on from there. If someone decides to be an auditor, they often specialize in particular industry - retail or restaurants or manufacturing, etc. But even inside a sub-category, the amount of information and research that comes out every year seems impossible to stay on top of - so is it?

In the same spirit, how important are conferences in your field? Are they something you need to watch even if you dont attend?

I’m asking my key professors these same questions, but I wanted to get Dopers’ insights also.

These questions are geared towards academics and professionals, but other viewpoints are welcome, especially hobbyists.
Thanks,
AP

Journals: I never sat down to read whole issues, except for the odd special issue on a particular topic (I’m an economist, BtW). I used to go to the library most weeks and look at all the contents pages of newly arrived journals. I don’t go to the library most semesters these days. I look at the contents pages of journals in our tea room. That’s half-a-dozen of the top Australian journals, half a dozen of top world journals (which are mainly US) and half a dozen journals in my general area. Mostly that’s just to keep up with what people I know are doing and what sort of stuff is being published in those journals.

Aside from that I use mailing lists, database searches and emails to colleagues for stuff close to my research and blogs for what’s going on in the wider discipline. You see a lot of stuff a couple of years before it’s published. Sometimes there are significant improvements in the published version. More often, useful technical detail is excised.

Generalists/ Specialists: There are kind of specialist generalists - and I’m one. They have particular angles rather than particular topics. So, for example, there’s a whole bunch of people beavering away on “son preference” amongst ethnic Indian people. Some of them will just do that topic, possibly spending their entire careers on one village in Fiji over time. Some of them will specialise in the microeconometric techniques used to look at that topic and others. Others will look at the topic as part of a broader interest in demographic issues. Still others will dip deeply but briefly into the area as part of a project about the economy-wide importance of demographic issues.

Conferences. You can get the papers. Attending is partly about being seen and standing up to questions. It can be a long way to go to talk for 10 minutes. Many sessions even in supposed high level conferences are dire. It’s also about the tea breaks and dinners - getting to know people and hearing what luminaries in the field think of Professor X’s work when they’ve had ten beers. And being able to email someone you got shitfaced with when you get home and be recognised as a mate who knows the price of fish.

I think the latter is more common, but people who get subscriptions to journals will at least flip through them for articles that are somewhat interesting. Sometimes when I’m bored, I’ll take down a journal volume from my boss’s shelf and do this.

I’m not rich enough to subscribe to journals (and I’ve let my society memberships expire).

I think it’s important for someone to keep in touch with what’s going outside of their field. I’m a wetlands biologist–so I try to stay in tune to what’s going on in wetlands science. But I’m also an ecologist, biologist, and scientist. Breakthroughs are occurring all over these broader disciplines, and while most of them are not relevant to my field, I feel that I should at least be aware of them. I’m a scientist because I like science, not because I like wetlands! So I’ll occassional read Science or Nature. Doing so also keeps me up to date on the Who’s Who in my field, since (usually) only the best get published in these big time journals.

In academics, at least, they are really important. I try to go to at least one a year. They are not always great, but when I go to them, I at least feel like I’m representing myself as a scientist. You learn about what research topics are popular (i.e., more likely to get funded). You also get to size up the competition and get ideas for how you can beat them.

It’s also cool to go to conferences because you can put faces to the names of folks’ whose papers you’re reading. And of course, there’s all the networking. My boss hunts for post-docs at meetings. I once had a guy offer me a research assistantship after he’d seen my talk at a local meeting.

When I was in grad school, I tried to shoot for one big, national meeting and one local meeting per year. And I always participated when I attended, either as a poster presenter or by giving a talk. Posters are easier on the nerves than talks, but they can require just as much preparation. And I always do far more talking with a poster than I do when I give an oral presentation (inevitably I lose my voice). But you’re more likely to leave an impact if you give a talk–especially a well-attended, well-received one. The society sponsoring the meeting will also give prizes to student presenters. As a student, I won a couple. Even though they weren’t Nobel prizes, they boosted my confidence in my abilities and they make my resume sparkle. :slight_smile:

If you’re a student, I really recommend that you make attending conferences a priority.

Journals: yes, they’re important and yes, people read them. Probably only the most dedicated will read each issue of a journal cover-to-cover, but everybody scans the table-of-contents looking for articles involving their topics, their friends, and their field’s superstars. Every field has some current debates that it’s important to keep on top of.

Specialization: I don’t really know how to handle this, seeing as my research is interdisciplinary anyway. If you want to meticulously work in all four major areas of accounting, then go ahead (but… how very like an accountant to do so!) Me, I ostensibly specialize in a subset of a subset of my field, but I also do serious work in an interdisciplinary field, and I encroach on the-field-next-door. You need to do the work that you can do, regardless of the conventional boundaries of your discipline.

Conferences: uber-importante, mostly to network and to get face-time with allies and enemies. It’s much easier to get a paper into a conference than into a peer-reviewed journal, so it’s an important source of CV items. And sometimes they’re in nifty places that it’s fun to go to.

This made me giggle.

Not staying on top of the literature is a good way to swiftly become irrelevant. From the other posts here, it would seem that others disagree, and this may simply be something that’s different from field to field. I’m a chemist, specializing in organometallic catalysis.

I keep up with ~30 journals. Some are published weekly, others whenever they feel like it (8-20/year.) No, I don’t read them cover-to-cover. I read anything that might be relevant to what I’m doing now and to what I may do some day in the future. Reading about different topics is a good way to get new ideas. There is enough overlap in my field with others that I need to cast a broad net to catch everything that might be of interest. Also, due to the nature of chemistry journals, material pertaining to even something very specific may show up in different journals.

For instance, if we look at US journals published by the American Chemical Society (ACS), I read JACS (J. of ACS), Organic Letters, Journal of Organic Chemistry, Organometallics, and a few others. JACS is the sort of “flagship journal” for ACS. New and exciting stuff goes in there, regardless of the field. These papers may be completely unrelated to what I’m interested in, but someone deemed them important, so they may be worth another look. Metal catalyzed reactions may end up in the other three, depending on a variety of factors. Now that’s just US journals. There’s also the Royal Society of Chemistry (UK) with it’s slew of journals, lots of European journals published by a variety of organizations, and a few Japanese journals. Lucky for me they’re all written in English. My next paper won’t be good enough for JACS, so I will probably send it to Organic Letters (ACS) or Angewandte Chemie (German).

I don’t have to pay for these because my employer does. If I did, well, that would suck. I’d have to find an academic library that carried them all. Unfortunately many are switching totally to electronic formats, making access difficult for the general public.

I’ve found the best way to keep up with the lit is to have it emailed directly to me as it comes out. Most chem journals will do this as soon as they’ve accepted a paper, even if it won’t be actually published for a few weeks or months. Some journals email me titles (with links.) Others just email me a link to a page with titles and maybe picture summaries. As soon as I read something that may be interesting, it’s good to make some record of it. I use the program Endnote for this.

Journals: yes, I read them, and subscribe to 4-5 in any typical year, one of which is a summary of abstracts across over 20 different areas of my profession. There are also some I read at the library, and, when I’m targeting a specific topic, I do a database search. However, I still need to read the article–an abstract won’t do for understanding whether the abstract’s assertions are substantiated and whether the methodology was appropriate.

Conferences: Very important, and a good way for students to enter the professional arena.

I should say that I’ve always been mystified to hear about fields in which conferences and conventions are primarily an excuse to get a deductible or paid vacation that consists of overdrinking and infidelity. I’m sure this happens in my field, but I never see it, and can say from personal experience that I have a hard time not attending every session, especially if I’m being reimbursed for a portion of the conference. I’ve had to work up to taking an afternoon off and actually seeing the city I’m in.

I browse the actuarial journals regularly (Australian and overseas). And since I’m doing an LLB I also tend to look at the local law journals.

Ditto, albeit for a different field.

Back when I was a grad student, I made weekly trips to the library to leaf through the tables of contents, because virtually nothing was available yet online. Now I can check whatever journals I want from my living room, if I can’t actually get the contents emailed to me directly.

Few journals are avaliable online without a hefty subscription.
The good ones run a few hundred an issue and sell mainly to institutional libraries.

I get IEEE Computer automatically, which is pretty useless. I get a more specialized magazine free because I’m a columnist and on the Ed Board. I also get a Transactions. That I skim the abstracts for my specialty, and at least skim the interesting articles. Fortunately there aren’t a lot of relevant journals in my specialty.

When I’m researching a topic, I do searches, but they’re no substitute for at least reading a table of contents.

Conferences are far more important, though I’m biased being a former General Chair and Program Chair of the biggest one in my area. Most journal papers got presented at a conference first. I’m involved in engineering, and a lot of conference papers on what people are actually doing would never show up in a journal. Plus, you get to see audience reaction and discuss the paper with others.

And I agree with Shoshana. Going to a conference is hard work. Just about every moment is booked, especially if you’re networking.

In my area we have workshops, which are small (50 - 100 max) conferences often with no published proceedings and minimal reviewing. They are for the rapid sharing of information. Workshop papers often show up in conferences the next year. I’ve run five (I think) and founded two, and they really stimulate discussion.

Just wanted to give this a small bump to try and get a few more responses, but also to thank those that have responded.

Thanks!

I now wonder if getting access to journal subscriptions is the main reason for joining associations - well that and the discounts on their conferences.

I do love the online access I get throught my university library, and will miss it when I finally graduate. I can see it worth going on to grad school as much for that as the degree itself. And it looks like the more prestigious or technical the journal, the more unlikely it will not be available for free online. Hmmmm - frakkin’ supply and demand…

(And to hijack myself, a growing pet peeve: students that complain about the price of tuition (especially at a dirt cheap state school) but never use half the resources that tuition makes available. The floor where the journals and other periodicals are kept is so quiet its almost creepy sometimes. But the floor beneath it with the computer lab…)

Anyway, thanks again.

AP

Exactly - and the societies know it also.

I use institutional access to thumb through an eighth of the stuff from the Nature publishing group.

The Reviews series are all cool, and Nature Biotech almost always has something to make anyone say, “wow.”

I think it’s a good idea just to try to know what’s “big” in a lot of different fields. I think that creative and productive people tend to be the ones that reach outside of their limited field for inspiration. Plus, it’s fun and it’s mentally challenging to try to follow along with the methods from most of these papers. Kind of like a cross-word puzzle for nerds, I suppose.