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Posts Tagged ‘productivity’:
Seeking help
Every day I receive emails, or comments on this blog, asking for help with R, forecasting, LaTeX, possible research topics, how to install software, or some other thing I’m supposed to know something about. Unfortunately, I cannot provide a one-man help service to the rest of the world. I used to reply to all the requests explaining where to go for help, but I stopped replying a while ago as it took too much time to do even that. If you want help, please ask at either stats.stackexchange.com (for R or statistics questions) or tex.stackexchange.com (for LaTeX questions). Unless you are one of my students, the only questions I will answer are ones that concern my R packages or research papers. And even then, I won’t reply if the answer is in the help files. I write those help files for a reason, so please read them. I’m sorry I can’t do more, but if I did everything people ask me to do, I’d never write any papers or produce any R packages, and I think that’s a better use of my time.
Following authors on Google Scholar
A great new feature has been added to Google Scholar Citations. For those authors who have set up a citations page, it is now possible to get email alerts for any new articles they publish, or for any new citations of their articles. So you can track citations to your own work this way, and stay up-to-date with key authors in your field. Setting up a Google Citations page is super-easy and was already worth doing. This new functionality is another reason to do it. After all, as researchers we want people to read our stuff, so we might as well make it as easy as possible for people to find what we write. To set up your Google Citations page, go to scholar.google.com/citations. To follow an author, find their citations page and look for the “Follow this author” box at the top right of the page. Hopefully, Google will add RSS feeds as an option in the future as I’d much rather get alerts that way then by yet more email in my inbox.
Organizing travel
Whether travelling to a seminar or conference, or just having a holiday, using a travel organizer can make the process simpler and easier. A good travel organizer keeps all your travel details (flights, hotels, car rentals, meetings, weather forecasts, etc.) organized and synced to whatever devices you use (two computers, an iPad and an iPhone in my case).
Some useful extensions for Gmail
Gmail can be even more awesome with a few extensions (for either Chrome or Firefox).
Researcher portals
A researcher portal is a website that attempts to list all the publications of a given researcher. Some portals also allow sharing papers, interacting with other researchers, calculating citation statistics, etc. Every researcher wants their work read and cited, so these websites can be useful tools for getting your work noticed. They can also function as a de facto home page if you don’t already have a personal website. Conversely, they can be a good way to find new work by researchers in your field. However, unless a site provides a relatively complete list of your publications, and covers a large proportion of the research community in your discipline, it is of limited value.
Use Mendeley to manage your references
Every researcher collects large numbers of papers, references, and notes, and it is important to have a good system to keep them all organized. For many years I had several thousand papers all numbered and stored in filing cabinets, with a JabRef database providing an index to them. These days, it’s much easier to have everything stored electronically, and so I have accumulated many pdfs (about 1300 so far) of published articles. But the problem of being able to find something fast is still important. Mendeley is a free software tool for managing your reference database. It actually solves many problems simultanéously and is likely to become an important part of how I work.
Expand your Dropbox space for free
I’ve extolled the wonders of Dropbox before. It is truly wondrous software, that synchronizes my computers, provides a complete online backup of all my files, allows access to all my files from any device connected to the internet, provides a simple way to share documents, allows me to roll back to previous versions of a file, and more. All done seamlessly and smoothly in the background.
In praise of Dropbox
Every couple of years, a new technology has a big impact on how I work. Gmail was one. My iPhone was another. And I rank Dropbox in the same category. I get three huge benefits in using Dropbox: All my files are backed up online. The house can burn down and I know I can still get my files. Also, if I’m away from my desktop or laptop, I can still access my files on my iPhone. Online backup is the only sensible backup strategy. My two main computers are kept in sync. When I finish work in my uni office, I can go home knowing that everything I’ve done during the day will be already on my home PC when I arrive home. And when I go to my uni office, everything I’ve done on my home PC will already be on my uni PC when I get to work. I never have to think about what files I will need; they will all be there. Dropbox provides a simple version control system. Other people use services like github and bazaar, but I find them far more complicated than I need. When I edit or delete files, Dropbox keeps previous versions in case I wish to restore them (up to 30 days normally, but forever if you pay a bit more).
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Hamming on research
Richard Hamming was an excellent mathematician who worked at the interface of mathematics and computer science. In 1986 he gave a wonderful talk entitled You and Your Research. Derek Smith on the AMS Graduate Student blog reminded me of it today. If you haven’t read it previously, stop work immediately and read it now.

Rob J Hyndman