Big IDEA

Research has gotten easier

30 September 2005

I can’t believe how much more convenient it is to do research now compared to when I was getting my master’s degree. From the comfort of my own couch I can search journal article databases and usually find the full text article in either PDF or HTML. I can email the articles to myself, and I’m using gmail (is there anybody in the world that doesn’t yet have a gmail account and needs an invite?) for that purpose because I like that I can archive mails and of course the search capability and the 2+ gigs of storage. I haven’t quite determined whether gmail indexes the PDF’s or not (I don’t think it does), but usually the citation and abstract that accompany the PDF’s are sufficient to allow me to find what I’m looking for. (Unfortunately the PDF’s have names like “8675309.pdf.”)

As an added bonus, I can export the bibliographic data of selected articles directly to my database on RefWorks. Sweet!

Now if only I had the time to read everything I want to read…

update: gmail does not index attachments. “Gmail doesn’t search attachments at this time. For example, a search for attachment filenames or for text contained in attachments will not necessarily return the messages to which those files are attached.”