ISSUE 6, July 2008
HIGHLIGHTS - Social Networking For Researchers
- Do Research and Teaching Mix?
- Undergrads Create New Science
- Writing An Undergrad Thesis
- Research Conferences Update
- Ongoing Items
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Social networking for researchers Reaching others through online tools Social networking is big! You've heard of Facebook, LinkedIn and MySpace. But more specific networks are better at meeting particular needs. In this new column, we'll review social networks that will interest Undercurrents readers. Remember one size doesn't fit all, so you might want to belong to three or four social networks to meet your professional and personal needs. This month, we're looking at Researcher ID.
What is ResearcherID.com?
ResearcherID is an online networking tool developed by the information company Thomson Reuters. (You may be familiar with them as the company that manages the ISI citation indexes.)
On ResearcherID, invited researchers register for a unique researcher ID number. Registered as well as non-registered users can search the Researcher Registry to view profiles and find potential collaborators. Users can: - Update their profile information;
- Build their publication list using Web of Science search services or uploading a file;
- Select to make their profile public or private.
Access is granted only to bona fide researchers, so you need to apply for an ID.
Oil and water: Do research and teaching mix?
It's a conundrum for many academic researchers who also have a teaching committment. For many, their love of science and quest for new knowledge seem to be burdened by the required teaching. But is a heavy teaching load a hindrance to an active, engaged research program? Writing in the Chronicle of Higher Education, Mathew Gendle, assistant professor of psychology at Elon University, in North Carolina, suggests that a "moderately heavy load" of undergraduate teaching should not hinder research endeavors and a high standard of accomplishment.
UG researchers create a new science
Most of us reading this are confident that undergraduate research yields tremendous benefits. But create a new science? Now, students at the University of California San Diego have developed a new paradigm in bioinformatics that some observers suggest ranks as a new scientific discipline.
According to ScienceDaily, the students' work, led by Pavel Pevzner, a HHMI professor, and a professor of computer science at UCSD, "may improve genomic and proteomic annotations." The breakthrough will allow scientists to solve numerous problems related the flood of genomics data coming from research labs worldwide.
The new methodology, called "comparative proteogenomics," provides ways to correlate information from an organism's genome (the sum of its genetic information) with that from its proteome (the sum of information about its proteins).
Researchers can use the methods derive solutions for thorny questions previously considered beyond the reach of bioinformatics.
Grad school advice #3: Writing your undergraduate thesis
A strong undergraduate thesis can be a tremendous help in getting into the graduate program of your choice.
But writing a thesis can be tough. Especially if you're not familiar with the structure of scientific papers or with documenting research.
Your advisor or undergraduate research office may already have published guidelines. If so, stick to them, especially if your thesis is part of your graduation requirement.
There are also specific rules for structuring the thesis. While these might vary depending on your discipline, the scope of the work and personal style, it's important to be familiar with this basic structure.
Just like cooking a complicated dish, it's fine to tweak it after you've tried it a few times, but first time around you want to stick to the recipe.
Martin Stute, a professor at Columbia University, and colleagues have put together an extensive and well-organized resource that shows how to structure the thesis.
Undergraduate Research Conferences Update
We now have data for more than 100 events in our Undergraduate Research Conferences project. We'll be starting the data analysis in the middle of August. Preliminary results will be available at the end of August, with a final report later in the Fall. Email rharris@sigmaxi.org if you have specific data requests. Please let us know if you have suggestions regarding the content for the report.
Ongoing items
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