A convenient way to stay up-to-date with carbon nanotube papers published this week is http://www.vjnano.org/. Have the table of contents e-mailed to you every week (see “Email alerts below). Both the nanoscience/CNTs and biophysics sections are relevant to our group.

Google Reader or a similar RSS reader is another easy way to stay up-to-date. Register for a Google account to get started, or, if you already have a Gmail account, simply log in. Click the “Add a subscription” button on the upper left, and type in the name of the journal you wish to follow; then select it from the search results and click “Subscribe.”

When you are doing a literature search on a specific topic you can use www.isiknowledge.com (choose the web of science option) or scholar.google.com. I prefer isiknowledge.com. Here are some strategies:

• Search for key words in the title/abstract
• Find a recent paper (last two or three years) and then start looking up the references. This is a quick way to find the key influential papers in a field.
• Start with a very influential paper (eg. Cui 2001) and then see who cites this paper

Whenever there are too many hits, try limiting to some of the more important journals, for example:

• Science
• Nature
• Nature Nanotechnology
• Nature Physics
• Nature Materials
• Nature Biotechnology
• Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS)
• Physical Review Letters
• Nano Letters
• ACS Nano
• Journal of the American Chemical Society
• Applied Physics Letters
• IOP Nanotechnology
• Advanced Materials

Cornell has online access to all major journals. From any campus computer, find the journal homepage and download the pdf of the article you want to read.

Many scientists are frustrated by the private journal system which make access to information (information which scientist generate through their research) prohibitively expensive. In the same spirit as the open source software movement, many scientists publish their work on “the archives”. You can access the condensed matter archives at http://xxx.lanl.gov/archive/cond-mat.

When you are working on a specific experiment, it is important to watch the new literature as it is published. This easiest way to do this is e-mail alerts. You should consider the Nano Letters “As soon as publishable” (ASAP) service and table of contents from Science, Nature, Nature Nanotechnology and Virtual Journal of Nanoscience and Technology.

There are many benefits to browsing table of contents. You get new ideas. You find out what fields are hot. You learn what groups are active in your field.

When a researcher “reads” an article, they often do not read the whole thing. Here is a typical formula for quickly digesting the important points of an article

• 1. Read the title and abstract. Do you have an idea what they were doing? (If not, you might need to read the introduction)
• 2. Look at the figures. Do you see some convincing data?
• 3. Read the conclusion. Is it consistent with the data in the figures?
• 4. Do you need more details? Jump directly into the appropriate section (background, methods, discussion etc.)

Deciphering academese can be very amusing, see the famous PhD comic

Many of the new nanotechnology ideas that we read about in journals have an accompanying patent written by the same authors. The US Patent office website is workable, but rather awkward to use. A more user-friendly interface is http://www.freepatentsonline.com/