I am in the running for a newly created position at the biopharmaceutical company where I work. Unlike every job I have ever had before this, this wouldn’t involve lab bench work but instead would involve finding papers in scientific journals online on research topics of potential interest to our scientists, and keeping these papers organized and available for reference. As I see it I would be a sort of resource for the other scientists.
Unfortunately I have been told by the hiring manager that I am at a disadvantage because I don’t have a Master’s degree (I have a BS, almost 20 years of work experience, and a Graduate Certificate in Clinical Trial Design and Project Management).
I would love to have suggestions for finding articles in technical journals online on specifc topics, ideally not long after they are published. I already know about PubMed, Google Scholar and email alerts that some publishers (like the Nature Publishing Group) provide. The email alerts tend to be somewhat general though, and so far I have only found ones that cover particular publishers, not all scientific material.
To make this slightly easier, we can restrict the discussion to literature published in English.
The tools I would have available to me would be a PC with Microsoft Office and Adobe, a high speed internet connection and essentially unlimited server space on the corporate network. I would probably be able to get more specialized applications if I could make a case for needing them.
So help me wow them with my (your) brilliant suggestions! What would be the most efficient way of finding and keeping organized a mess of timely scientific references?
For chemistry, nothing beats CAS (they know it too), but just C&EN’s webpage highlights helps. The advantage of CAS is that it doesn’t come with an expiration date.
I have no idea what databases to search pharmaceutical literature from since my field is biology, but when organising my literature searches I have been using Endnote (linked directly to in my use ISI web of science). The point is that when you find a paper you find interesting, Endnote will save the abstract and author/journal information. That way you can organise them according to topic or author or whatever other way you find floats your boat.
What you want to do is set up some sort of intranet accessed bibliographic/reference database, especially one that provides RSS feeds - try Refbase for a start (I got that from a quick Google, no implied recommendation, YMMV, etc). There will be other options.
You do the work of identifying articles, writing abstracts and tagging them, and let the researchers subscribe to the RSS feeds that interest them.
Your sources may even supply RSS feeds, in which case you can just transform their data for your own purposes.
What you want is a toolset that manages the grunt work, so you can concentrate on using your experience and analytic skills to identify and classify useful material and write concise abstracts that help the researchers identify material of interest.
Generally speaking: biology, molecular biology, biochemistry and genetics, with a particular emphasis on how these might relate to various human diseases.
Historically my company has worked on metabolic diseases in which people were lacking entirely or had defective versions of some enzyme in a biochemical pathway. We have a couple of products that are working versions of these molecules that can help some of the symptoms of these diseases.
I honestly don’t know what our focus is going forward, but I don’t think we are going to depart too much from this model.
Thanks for all the suggestions so far, this is just the kind of stuff I knew you guys would come through with.
If this is a large-ish company (or even if not) they should have subscriptions to online services like Dialog . You can poke around in it a bit as a guest but you have to be a subscriber to enjoy its full power.
You might also want to visit your local university library’s webpage and check out their lists of reference sources. You may need to arrange an account for yourself or your company to use them but you can usually find the names and descriptions of their content in library lists.
Are they really looking for info only in ‘technical journals online’?
This is how this particular position was described to me, but it would only service one part of the company. No doubt other areas of the company explore other avenues.
Many university library websites have resources suggesting online resources by discipline. I know there is a good one at San Diego State University because my new job has similar aspects, although in a different field.
Well Dialog is an online searchable database of papers and grey literature; large quantities of this kind of information has never made it into journals, particularly online journals. So if they are specifying only online journals, they’re actually missing out on a whole lot of other information sources but maybe they have a reason for choosing to limit their information sources.
Yes, I have not had problems with MS word and Endnote yet, I can easily import references into documents (theres a link tool for that), which saves some time making sure the reference list is correct and in the correct format.
They may be missing some things, but I suppose that if what they really want is current, peer-reviewed papers, the gray stuff really isn’t going to matter much.
Laughing Lagomorph, how large is the science staff you’ll be doing this research for? The reason I ask is - in my field, keyword searches of databases like Web of Science are useful, but only to a point, because there’s always some potentially useful paper out there that doesn’t get flagged with the keywords I’ve been using. If you don’t have too many people to answer to, I’d strongly recommend reviewing the ToCs of at least 15-20 of the better-known journals in your field, and taking the time to read through the abstracts of the ones you think might be useful. It may sound like a lot of work, but it isn’t really - the journals don’t come out more than once a month, and there’s no better way to get a good feel for papers that could be appropriate for your staff but that somehow missed coming up in the keyword searches.
As a grad student, I used to go to my department library religiously every Friday and spend the afternoon just browsing through the journals on the shelf. I learned so much good stuff that way, things that often became useful to me at a later date because I was now aware of a certain topic/technique/etc. that wasn’t originally part of my intended reference search. (These days I haven’t the time to browse quite so much, but I still “leaf” (electronically) through a bunch of journals every month.) I have a grad student myself now, and have been teaching her how to do the same… and it’s fun to keep hearing her say, “I found this paper, and I had no idea that _____” (whatever her latest discovery was).
Bottom line, though, is that since you’re effectively going to be a librarian for your science staff, a greater familiarity with their research interests - enough to be able to search a bit beyond what you’re asked to search for - will make you as valuable a resource as the database you’ll be creating. And I bet it will also help to make any concerns management may have about your not having a master’s degree go away.
Getting references from for example Pub Med to Endnote is easy (you can even search in PubMed through Endnote).
From Endnote to Word you just copy and paste it where you want the reference to be. This will appear in Word within brackets like this: {Adams, 2005 #68}. When you are finished with the document you just convert the references to whatever format you want them to be like numbered, author name or whatever you choose. You can also choose how you want the reference list to look like, numbered alphabetical etc.
There are lots of pre set options available to choose from. It can for example format the references in the exact way a particular journal wants them to be formatted.
I probably only use a fraction of the things Endnote is capable of but I really like the program. I’ve been working on a big report with hundreds of references and without a program to help it would have been a nightmare.