Prometheus 6:

May 21, 2003

Science Journals

Living Code, a Corante-hosted blog on "biology, information, data and genomics," just reminded me of a link in my bookmarks you might want to know about if you know folks that are into such stuff. Highwire Press hosts the content of a whole bag of science journals that allow free access to their reports and such. In general they have to age a little and some allow free trial access, but some of the sites allow free access to everything.

For college students this is an excellent resource. Not only do they linkify the supporting references within the reports, they apparently (because I haven't checked this part out personally I need to retain some deniability here) add links at the end of the report to newer submissions on the same subject. This would enable researchers to see if the information presented in the report held up.

Future Links
Now scroll a little further down, past the References. This is something that you have never seen before and something that can only happen because of the database that Highwire has constructed. These are links forward in time, to papers published more recently that cite this paper. The first one was published this last month! This is brand new.

What Has Changed
One of the difficult things when examining a paper even a few years old is determining just how much has changed; have the conclusions of the paper held up or been overturned; where is the bleeding edge of research today; what path did it take?. Normally you have to do some keyword seaches to find something recent on the field and do some detective work. Now, for the first time, you can link forward to articles that will help you find out the answers to these questions.

Nice concept.

posted by Prometheus 6 at 5/21/2003 09:32:52 AM |

Posted by P6 at May 21, 2003 09:32 AM | Trackback URL: http://www.prometheus6.org/mt/mt-tb.cgi/583

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