When searching the literature for material to support my own research, Google Scholar is an indispensable tool. Still, there are many articles that look promising, but to which I do not have electronic access (even through my own institution's library).

Self-archiving is a great idea, but many authors do not make their work available in this way. Even if they do, it is often very difficult to find... the availability of the paper on a personal web site does not mean I am going to find a link to it in Google Scholar search results.

One way around this is to self-archive your papers at Selected Works, from Berkeley Electronic Press. This commercial project offers free web pages to individual academics where they can post their own work, and the best part: Papers posted at Selected Works are indexed by Google Scholar.

In preparing for this post, I was testing out whether I could find papers I knew were self-archived. Michal E. Smith, a Mesoamerican archaeologist who is a big proponent of self-archiving (and the creator of Publishing Archaeology), makes his papers available on his own website. I searched for some of these papers using Google Scholar, and found PDFs of them... not on his own page, but at his Selected Works page.

Self-archiving on your own university website is fine (and everyone should do this), but with Selected Works, you get an easy, professional-looking way to make your downloadable publications available and findable via the internet.


Useful links:

Financial viability of open access

You should self-archive your publications

Selected Works

Labels: open access, research

After two straight semesters of graduate seminar courses (which were a lot of work, but that I enjoyed immensely), I have an easy load this semester. I am only taking a single undergraduate course: ASM 246, Human Origins, taught by Donald Johanson (as I described back in November).

Johanson is an enjoyable lecturer: Always friendly, explains things clearly, and has great stories from his fieldwork in Africa. My only disappointment is how much of this material was already covered in ASM 104. This makes it more difficult to sit through the lectures, since there's so little "aha" information (at least for me).

The light load has left me with a lot more time for my personal research projects, yet I find that I am squandering a great deal of the extra time and not making much headway. Why is it that the more time we have for something, the less efficient we are at getting things done?

I read a great story in the New York Times about an author, Simon Sinek, who discovered he got a lot less writing done when he reduced his travel and had more time for writing. It seems that he did most of his writing on the plane, and the inevitable dead battery in his laptop provided a sense of urgency that motivated him to write quickly.

Does this mean I need a greater workload to be more productive? Perhaps...

Labels: humanorigins, research