Category Archives: Uncategorized

Presentations: one lump of sugar, or two?

Recently I watched a friend give a presentation on a research topic he’s been working on for years. I found the presentation to be fascinating, and the clearest explanation of his work that I have seen to date. But I felt compelled to criticise him on one point. In order to lighten up the speech [...]

Basic research in the UK

The Guardian reports that a new government panel will henceforth judge what research is worthy of funding in the UK. Universities will have to make the case for their research projects in order to receive money. Reuters UK, perhaps keen to draw attention, blurt out that “‘Mickey Mouse’ degrees face [a] funding battle”. Examples cited by [...]

Bibliography tools (2) – Mendeley

Following a comment on my previous foray into bibliography management systems, I had a look at the product known as Mendeley. In order to evaluate Mendeley, let’s ask ourselves what we want from a bibliography management system in the modern research environment. At a bare minimum, we want an easy way to catalogue and search [...]

The future of the web browser

The web browser, it is safe to say, has gone from humble origins to being the single most widely used piece of desktop software (based on my own usage, but I don’t think I’m untypical). This development continues today. The battles being fought and the tactical decisions being made here reach a very large audience [...]

Best bibliography management systems?

A question for readers who happen to manage bibliographies: what, if any, bibliography management systems do you use? I started using Aigaion for mine. Then I found out that there’s an open system called bibsonomy, which is potentially much better since it lets you tag and share bibliographies socially, and it seems to already know [...]