Keeping Track of Publications

This is frustrating. While I’m usually pretty good with keeping up with the latest publications and preprints (via journals’ rss feeds), I like to follow the work of particular groups as well. I do this by going to the group’s webpage (which never works - hardly anyone seems to keep an accurate publication list) or searching on ISI Web of Science (which is far too time-consuming). ISI appears to have an option where they email you updates to your latest saved search, but I can’t figure out how to make it do what I want.

Ideally, there would be an online service (which covered all physics, chemistry, materials science etc. journals) which would allow me to input an unlimited number of author names, and would email me (or provide an rss feed) with updates to their citation record as they occurred. For free. Maybe such a thing already exists, but I haven’t found it.

Update: Via an overly complicated combination of stringing together search terms and saving histories, I managed to figure out a solution on ISI (I think - I’ll have to wait until the first email alert to be certain). As psi*psi points out, Yahoo Pipes may be a viable option, but I haven’t had the time to play around with it to figure out what it can and can’t do.

Nature Education

The nice people who bring us Nature (and its many progeny) have embarked on a new venture “to develop innovative educational resources and tools for science students and their professors”: Nature Education. As their recent press release states:

Nature Education will take a non-traditional approach to the rapidly-evolving college education market, focusing primarily on creating leading edge, digitally-based, learning solutions in biology, chemistry and physics…

Instructors and students are thirsty for learning environments that move beyond traditional textbooks and even course management systems to provide a highly interactive and personalized experience that simultaneously builds understanding, inspires career and research aspirations, and connects the student to a worldwide community of likeminded thinkers. With its excellent content, brand, global reach, and community of practicing scientists, NPG and Macmillan are superbly positioned to catalyze and capitalize on a radical shift in education.

So what exactly are these “digitally-based learning solutions”? The press release doesn’t say, and a few seconds of Googling don’t turn up too much, either. Is Nature Education a new journal? (Probably not, given the emphasis on breaking with tradition and being digital and all.) An online repository of open-access course materials, à la MIT’s OpenCourseWare? Something more?

I wonder where they’re going with this. It’s hard to say, but it looks like the Nature Publishing Group’s really focusing on being innovative, inventive, and breaking with tradition, in an interesting kind of way. Another example that springs to mind is last year’s peer-review trial (which although widely unpopular was an intriguing debate/experiment). It should be interesting for educators/anyone interested in science education to see what results from this.