Young researchers starting their careers will often look for reviews, opinions and research manuscripts from the most influential authors of their chosen field. In science, however, unlike many other topics on the Internet, ranked lists or manuscript repositories of top authors sorted by research topic are hard to come by. For some researchers, the idea of such a task brings the words ‘wasted time’ to their minds; the most critical condemn it as a frivolous pursuit. Maybe so. In my opinion, however, it as an excellent starting point.
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| Home Page of ResearchGate with more than 3 millions of users |
These days, more people than ever are involved in science and research. Just look at ResearchGate’s homepage. There are over 3 million persons there –and we’re only counting ResearchGate users. Once simple undertakings, such as finding the right manuscript to cite, the most authoritative group on a topic, or the best software application for a specific task, have become increasingly difficult for graduate students navigating this ocean of data, despite the availability of services such as Google Scholar or Pubmed. The situation will only worsen in the future, as is easy to see by simply tallying the number of published papers in the fields of Proteomics, Genomics, Bioinformatics and Computational Proteomics since 1997:
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Number of published manuscripts in Pubmed per year (1997-2012).
the statistics was done using the Medline Trend Service
http://dan.corlan.net/medline-trend.html
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In 2012 alone, over 6,000 and 17,000 manuscripts were published in the fields of proteomics and bioinformatics, respectively. Our young field, computational proteomics, published more than four hundred papers. Perhaps well-established PI’s or Group Leaders can easily tell apart derivative or me-too contributions from groundbreaking work, but young scientists, who spend most of their time implementing someone else’s ideas, can certainly have a hard time doing so. Although technology has come to the rescue with today’s mixture of search engines and social networking tools (ResearchGate, Google Scholar, twitter and LinkedIn among them), the best way to harness its power is, precisely, by starting from a ranked list of the most authoritative voices within a field of research, whose whereabouts can then be traced in the scientific literature, the blogosphere, and anywhere else.
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