I usually hate mindmaps

Since Alan has suddenly decided that he actually likes lists, I’ve decided to throw off my ‘bulleted-list-kindagirl‘ persona and attempt to use a mindmap for something useful.

I’m writing a review, looking at ‘dealing with plagiarism in the internet age‘. I’ve gathered my sources, read the majority of them and inwardly digested and cogitated. I needed a way to get my thoughts down quickly and organise them into a structure, so I used a good old fashioned pencil and paper and drew myself a mindmap.  It just sort of happened that way. It occurred to me (having been playing with google wave and wondering what on earth it was for) that it would be great to have a way to organise my papers within this mindmap structure. So, I redrew the mindmap on mindmeister and started going through the papers I had, adding them into the relevant sections of the map. I added notes to each citation to remind me why I’d put it there and what evidence or opinions I wanted to draw from the paper into the review.

This exercise has highlighted places that I need to do some more research and some papers have influenced the structure and content of the mindmap, but it’s getting there and has really helped me to begin to synthesize my thoughts.

Now, what would be really cool is a google wave robot that would crawl my mindmap, pull the citations and link them straight to the Citeulike bookmarks I’ve been keeping for this project and then direct to the DOIs (I’d have like IGOR to come and suggest/ pull up my citations as I was adding them too!) then when I pulled off the outline plan from mindmeister, I’d have an almost rewritten review complete with citations and live links to the references. Readers of the review would then have a clickable resource and a link to the Citeulike bookmarks to share and use.

RSS and journals

When setting up our smallworlds project and the course content for key skills undergraduate course, we struggled to find good sources of customisable RSS searches in peer reviewed journals. In the course of searching for something else, I stumbled across a solution today, the JISC project ticTOC.

ticTOC

ticTOC allows you to search for journals by journal name or publisher, then add them to a list ‘myTOC’.

The table of contents for these journals can then be exported as a OPML file for an RSS reader. Very simple and easy to do.

TOCs RSS in Google Reader

I would like to be able to take this one stage further and add search terms but, it is a step in the right direction.

Of course, I put it on twitter and then got another suggestion for something similar (thanks twitterverse!), myjournals. Tools like these are the workhorses that we need to encourage more scientists into the web2.0 world. Current awareness is the bread and butter of science, if we can make it obvious that RSS can turn your bread and butter into a cheese toasty we are laughing!

update: general Search added December 2008.