A range of tools.

For a long time now I have been accumulating links to “useful” pages, sites etc., Some are in Pocket (I’ve had an account there since it was ReadItLater), some in Diigo (moved to that after Delicious was taken over by Yahoo! and lost some functionality [now largely regained]); and some in Evernote  (generally personal links – I started using Springpad, till they closed). Yet more are simply favourited (or, now, liked) tweets.

In an attempt to actually start to use some of these, I’m aiming to update my blog with some of them. Today’s is a Timeline of Research tools created by Jeroen Bosman and
Bianca Kramer at the University of Utrecht.

The interactive is a bit fiddly to use; though to look at particular tools there’s also a Google spreadsheet (best to copy it if you want to sort; I didn’t see the warning not to sort till after I had … managed to unsort I hope). What I found fascinating was the tools that I remembered I’d forgotten all about. That’s one of the dangers of encouraging the use of tools; is it going to be here today, gone tomorrow? [Though it’s generally possible to create backups – whereas with paper notes, I wonder how many people duplicated them, in case the dog ate them…] I’d not realised till I looked at it that PubMed was only launched in 1997. In the summer of 1999, I was doing my MSc in Information Systems – which involved creating a tutorial for Health Visitors to learn to search both generic websites (I realised then the power of Google over my coursemates’ favourite – AltaVista); but also specialist ones – including PubMed (and the rather efficient NorthernLight).

The conference poster they have created on Figshare covers currently popular tools, as well as some example workflows.