Some academic research tricks for the web

I really shouldn’t share these tricks since they are secret weapons for massive research productivity (SWMRP), but I hope some of you will share your own research productivity tricks also, so that academic bloggers will quickly dominate the research world.

• Use Firefox! If you do, you can add citeseer, google scholar and wikipedia to your quick search bar. When (academic) research becomes intensive, make google scholar or citeseer your default Firefox search engine! If you do this, your research productivity will jump. I hope you will then give me credit in all future papers you write! I could use the fame.
• (From Suresh) You can use citeulike to collect references for papers, and export the result to bibtex at the end. Don’t forget to add the bookmarklet to your bookmarks for extra convenience. I have my own citeulike library though I haven’t used it for collecting references for a paper, so far.
• Similarly, for tracking random web sites, del.icio.us is a must. Don’t forget to install the Firefox plugin for extra convenience.
• A little known fact is that Google Scholar can be configured (see “preferences”) to export search results to bibtex. Again, this is the sort of thing that can make your productivity jump so that you’ll be tempted to start all your papers by “Daniel Lemire made this paper possible…” Ok, maybe not, but close.
• Subscribe to lots and lots of mailing lists and newsletters, but instead of reading them all, just have your mail client flag those whose text contain keywords you are interested in. This is especially powerful to monitor interesting call for papers.

Disclaimer: if you use these tricks, you ought to be able to easily write 15 papers a year. Ah! But why don’t I write so many papers? Because I’ve got bad habits such as constantly changing my field of research, thinking for a very long time about non-paperable ideas or writing code, sometimes pointless code, for months at a time, just because I like playing with live algorithms. Also, I’m a little bit dumb and ignorant.