Wednesday, November 12, 2008

SPF format follow-up

I've heard back from a few people, and I think the new format works much better than the previous ones. I am posting the EndNote libraries (ENL files, not papers) to my DropBox account, which seems to work well - just a quick right click for me and no accounts needed for everyone else. If you don't have a drop box account, no need to get one, but it does rock. Personally, I like Microsoft's Live Mesh more, but there's no option to share with people outside the service (now with Mac and Linux Clients).

One person posted that fewer items with a brief rundown would be helpful. The only reason for the long list this tome was that it was the first SPF in over a month, so wading through the papers should be easier when I am good about posting weekly. As for abstracts, there are two options:

1) The links are to the PubMed entry, usually, which means that you can find the papers that look interesting from the titles and stack up a bunch of tabs in the background (hold down control in FF or IE when clicking the link, and if it opens as the active tab, check your preferences). So, the easiest thing to do is just control-click down the list when something piques your interest and load up a bunch of tabs. Do a quick perusal of the abstracts and close the tabs for those that don't interest you.
2) Alternatively, use the EndNote file, which has the abstract included (usually).

I'll try to single out a top 5 or 10 and post them at the top with a brief 1-3 sentences, but they are going to be the ones that I like, meaning they might not mesh with your interests (particularly, there will probably be few EEG/ECoG papers). I do read all the abstracts for these, and they all hit on something worthwhile or of personal interest, so it isn't like I just dump my feeds into the list. The 30 or so weekly papers are chosen out of around 500-1000 that make it to my aggregator, so a great deal of filtering is already in place. I have expanded the criteria a little since beginning in the interest of the site, but that means I no longer read all the papers posted. (I also have a few each week that I don't post for person interest and to keep everyone's idea of my exact project purposely murky.)

So, things will keep evolving, but this is a good start, IMO.

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