The Lighthouse

As a postgraduate student, it can be difficult to keep track of all the latest developments and innovations in your subject area. Fortunately, there are a number of online tools that can help you stay up-to-date and aware of the latest news in your field.

Organisations

Many disciplines have online communities or professional organisations (e.g. the New Zealand Institution of Chartered Accountants or the New Zealand Planners Institute). These organisations often contain current material:

• online newsletters
• discussion forums
• mailing lists (e.g. ProMED-Mail)
• blogs (e.g. Language Log)
• upcoming conferences and conference proceedings

Journals

Identify the most prominent and prestigious journals in your discipline. What are the key publications? Which journals are cited most often? Whenever a new issue of those journals is released, skimming the contents can give you a good idea of current trends.

In the sciences, various methods have been presented to identify key journals:

• Eigenfactor
• Impact factor
• SJR indicators

Your lecturer might also know which journals to watch.

People

Every discipline has certain people who are especially prominent or relevant. They might be a significant researcher, or a prolific promoter of the subject. Often such people will have an online presence:

• Twitter accounts (e.g. John Finn)
• Public social network accounts (LinkedIn, Facebook, and/or Google+)
• Blogs (e.g. Teaching and Learning Kernels)

Many blogs have an RSS feed that lets you ‘subscribe’ to a blog and see when new posts have been added. It’s easy to gather a large collection of these using a feed aggregator like Feedly, which gives you a customised news feed for your subject.

Topics

Google Alerts allows you to designate a topic or set of keywords. Google Alerts will automatically e-mail you whenever a new webpage (or news article, blog post, or book) appears online that contains that topic.

Offline

Many departments at Massey offer a seminar series: free lectures on recent developments in the discipline. If your department has a large group of postgraduate students, you could also create your own study group to share and discuss innovations in your area.