It’s easy to feel overwhelmed by the impressive speed at which new science is published. How to keep up with all this is an art that few have mastered. Rami is looking for some pointers:
Which are the must-follow journals to keep up to date with new geodynamic research?
Dear Rami,
Carefully checking the table of contents of freshly printed issues of your favourite journals is obviously the most modern and time-efficient way of keeping up with the new exciting developments in your field. You wouldn’t want to miss anything that could be ground-breaking, so best have a look at everything that is published every single week. I am sure the list of must-follow journals publishing geodynamics content (a niche and restricted topic, as it is well known) cannot be that long.
Obviously, you have got to check Nature and Science every week. Every single week. Only the most innovative, the most significant, the-academic-equivalent-of-gold research gets published there.
We have to be realistic, sometimes clerical errors (in no way related to how those journals are being run) happen and important research might end up in tier-B journals, like Nature Geoscience and Nature Communications.
Additionally, we all know that some underdogs seem to really like publishing in tier-C geophysical journals too, like Journal of Geophysical Research and Tectonics, so we must follow those as well. Still manageable: how many of those can there be?
You still have plenty of time in your daily schedule to throw in a couple of more specialised journals in the mix. You might be one of those stuck-ups obsessed with comparing your models with data (ugh…boring!) then you just need to add journals publishing seismology or mineralogy articles (surely there is only a couple of those). Or perhaps you are one of those math-loving people working on geophysical fluid dynamics. Fear not! It’s not like new journals appear every now and then on the topic, so it’s only a small addendum to your still very short list of journals to follow.
And since you give me the idea of being thorough, don’t forget the preprint repository. One, only the one is a must-follow. Ok, maybe a couple…
Or, alternatively, you could just set up Google Scholar/Researchgate notifications to follow specific authors/topics. It’s entirely up to you.
Yours truly,
The Sassy Scientist
PS: This post was written just in time to update my list of must-follow people on Twitter
