{"id":126,"date":"2013-04-15T17:37:15","date_gmt":"2013-04-15T04:37:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/sites.massey.ac.nz\/thelighthouse\/?p=126"},"modified":"2013-04-17T17:14:59","modified_gmt":"2013-04-17T04:14:59","slug":"staying-current-in-your-field","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sites.massey.ac.nz\/thelighthouse\/2013\/04\/15\/staying-current-in-your-field\/","title":{"rendered":"Staying current in your field"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>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.<\/p>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<h3>Organisations<\/h3>\n<p>Many disciplines have online communities or professional organisations (e.g. the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nzica.com\">New Zealand Institution of Chartered Accountants<\/a> or the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.planning.org.nz\/MainMenu\">New Zealand Planners Institute<\/a>). These organisations often contain current material:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>online newsletters<\/li>\n<li>discussion forums<\/li>\n<li>mailing lists (e.g. <a href=\"http:\/\/www.promedmail.org\/\">ProMED-Mail<\/a>)<\/li>\n<li>blogs (e.g. <a href=\"http:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/\">Language Log<\/a>)<\/li>\n<li>upcoming conferences and conference proceedings<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<h3>Journals<\/h3>\n<p>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.<\/p>\n<p>In the sciences, various methods have been presented to identify key journals:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/eigenfactor.org\/\">Eigenfactor<\/a><\/li>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/www.sciencegateway.org\/rank\/index.html\">Impact factor<\/a><\/li>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/www.scimagojr.com\/journalrank.php\">SJR indicators<\/a><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Your lecturer might also know which journals to watch.<\/p>\n<h3>People<\/h3>\n<p>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:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Twitter accounts (e.g. <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/PhDSkills\">John Finn<\/a>)<\/li>\n<li>Public social network accounts (<a href=\"http:\/\/nz.linkedin.com\/\">LinkedIn<\/a>, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/\">Facebook<\/a>, and\/or <a href=\"http:\/\/plus.google.com\">Google+<\/a>)<\/li>\n<li>Blogs (e.g. <a href=\"https:\/\/sites.massey.ac.nz\/talk\/\">Teaching and Learning Kernels<\/a>)<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Many blogs have an <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/RSS\">RSS feed<\/a> that lets you \u2018subscribe\u2019 to a blog and see when new posts have been added. It\u2019s easy to gather a large collection of these using a feed aggregator like <a href=\"http:\/\/www.feedly.com\/\">Feedly<\/a>, which gives you a customised news feed for your subject.<\/p>\n<h3>Topics<\/h3>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.google.co.nz\/alerts\">Google Alerts<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n<h3>Offline<\/h3>\n<p>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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":89,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-126","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-postgraduate-study"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.massey.ac.nz\/thelighthouse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/126","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.massey.ac.nz\/thelighthouse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.massey.ac.nz\/thelighthouse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.massey.ac.nz\/thelighthouse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/89"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.massey.ac.nz\/thelighthouse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=126"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/sites.massey.ac.nz\/thelighthouse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/126\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":132,"href":"https:\/\/sites.massey.ac.nz\/thelighthouse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/126\/revisions\/132"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.massey.ac.nz\/thelighthouse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=126"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.massey.ac.nz\/thelighthouse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=126"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.massey.ac.nz\/thelighthouse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=126"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}