By Oscar A. Escobar
Florida USA – Gt - October 27, 2015
I don’t know if this could be called a process, I imagine it
is very different from academic research, and so it may yield different types
of results; still, it is time consuming and requires lots of reading. I usually dedicate
anywhere from 2-6 cumulative daily hours to this form of research.
I am generally looking for the most recent public
information for my twitter feed, so my daily search is focused on the most
recent results on geoengineering, usually during the last 24 hrs to a week.
Google scholar updates about 3 times a week, so I go through
the updates generated by my list of google scholar ‘alerts’, but more on this
later.
I receive daily email alerts from a couple of journals, I subscribe
to one of them, and for the others I rely on the free articles and abstracts
provided. My blog, A #Geoengineering #Climate
Issues Blog – Geoingenieria, is based on blogger, so I quickly check through the
new entries generated by my reading list there. I also check on twitter.
On slow ‘news days’ I may also look for older or missed
content in Academia.edu, google scholar and google books and look through my
twitter lists.
Google is where I usually start.
The google search routine:
1-
Open your email, and then the ‘compose’ page and
leave it open, I prefer yahoo for a reason described later.
2-
After opening a second tab on my web browser, I
start my search there with the most obvious… the google search.
Start your search on google with the term of interest i.e. geoengineering.
After performing the search go to the search options immediately
below the google search bar –Web, news, video, etc. - click
on ‘news’ then on ‘search tools’
then make a choice from the drop down menu to narrow the results to that time
frame. Since I generally do daily searches I usually chose ‘past 24 hours’.
Sifting through
google results:
Reading the title and source of the articles generated is
the obvious way for deciding whether or not to even read the short excerpt. If still interested after reading the short excerpt
then, right-click on the title then left-click ‘open link on new tab’. Article will open on a new tab but you will
remain on the search page. Don’t go to the article yet.
Go down the line of results the same way, if there are many
pages do it until you have opened five or six new tabs (if I open more than
that my computer tends to slow down).
Without closing the search results page, go to the article
tabs one by one and quickly mouse over the article or read the complete article
now. Since I will come back to it later
to ‘#categorize’ it for my twitter feed, I usually wait to fully read it until
then.), if the article is of interest then ‘copy’
the link address from the address bar.
Click on the e-mail tab, paste the address link on the body
of the email. After doing this yahoo mail will usually generate a box with the title and a small
picture. This is important because otherwise
it would also be necessary to copy and paste the article’s title, adding
another step. Having the title is
important as you can use it to search the article in case the link address changes
or any other issue. If after a few seconds yahoo mail does not generate this
box, go back to the article tab, copy the article’s title and then paste it on
top (or below) the link address. PDF’s won’t generate this box so you need to
copy and paste their titles.
After you have sifted through each of the open articles
close their tabs by clicking on the small ‘x’ to the right of the tab.
Go back to the google search tab to keep going down the list
of results in the same way.
Storing article links:
When you have finished going through all the results or need
to step away from the computer send the
e-mail to yourself, (try not to send individual emails for each article).
I would write geo or other helpful identifier in the subject
bar.
After a few seconds, sometimes minutes, go back to the incoming
box, find the e-maiI you sent yourself and mark it on the small box to the left
of it. When you do this the row of options at the top of the mail list will
activate the trash icon (delete), the
folder (move), spam, etc., click on
the folder (move) icon, go to the bottom of the drop down menu to create folder to store these e-mails.
Name it so that it would be at the top or near the top of the list of folders.
Continue with google
search:
3-
When you have gone through all the ‘news’ results
in the way described above, click on ‘web’,
still below the google search bar. This will take you back to the more general
search results. Repeat narrowing
procedure using the search tools, -last
24hrs, last week, etc. Here you will get a lot more pages, usually around
18 with 10 links each. Sift through the
results as described in ‘sifting through google results’ and store the article
links.
Creating a google scholar
alert:
Perform a google search with the term ‘google scholar’,
click on ‘google scholar’, once there perform a search with desired term i.e. ‘climate
justice’, go down to the bottom of results listing and look for ‘create alert’. On the search bar the [intitle:"climate
justice"] command will look for the term only on the title of the study,
for a more general search create another alert without the word ‘intitle’ i.e. Just
“climate justice” or the term desired.
Sifting through e-mailed
alerts:
Once you have finished with google search, check your email
for any alerts from journals subscriptions, usually you don’t need to pay to receive
these alerts, sometimes there is access to full articles, just the abstract and
sometimes just the title. If there is a
title that sounds very interesting but there is no access in full, perform a
google search and/or search in academia.edu.
Sift through these e-mails content the same way as with the
google searches and store the links. It is helpful to open another tab and load
your email there again opening the compose
page to be able to store the chosen links without having to close your inbox.
There are many sources for science and tech alerts and blogs,
but these are the ones I receive them from.
Science Magazine http://www.sciencemag.org/
Nature http://www.nature.com/nature/index.html
Geoengineering Google Group https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/geoengineering
WeSRCH http://www.wesrch.com/
Google Scholar https://scholar.google.com/
Sifting through
google scholar alerts and google books:
Scholar generates these alerts about two or three times a
week. When sifting through scholar sometimes the link takes you to a ‘google
book’ page for an e-book.
Here you may be able to read a nice ‘preview’ of that book.
But this page usually also has its own search bar confined
within the book content. If the original search term from the alert does not
appear in the book’s search box, perform a search with that term.
Explore the book with different terms i.e. Biofuels, carbon
capture, biodiversity, etc.
The results may yield full or partial studies. Or at least
you will know the number of references, shown within a short excerpt.
A couple of more ways
that could also yield good information:
-Searching in Google Books using the
term you are interested in. This one is different than within a specific book.
Go to google books and perform a search then narrow your search using the
options below the search bar.
-Performing searches in
Academia.edu. As you type on Academia’s search box, a drop down menu will give
you various ‘group names or themes’ with a number of followers, when you click
on any of these groups’ their page shows the number of people and number of
documents. Click on documents. Each group may have different or shared
documents even if they have very similar names. Many of these are draft papers.
-Mobil. Sometimes if I am waiting
in line or something like that, I check for articles from my twitter feed on
the cellphone then e mail the articles to myself.
- I have compiled a couple of
resource pages in my blog that can be accesed through the tabs.
Links to academic research, mainstream news and organizations (List
does not equal endorsement) http://geoengineeringclimateissues.blogspot.com/2015/03/links-to-academic-research-mainstream.html
Links to public perception and activism (List does not equal
endorsement) http://geoengineeringclimateissues.blogspot.com/2015/03/public-perception-and-activism.html
I hope this post is helpful in
developing research strategies to anyone interested in the issues related to
climate geoengineering.
My personal Scholar Alert query
[ “Atmospheric science” ]
[ “aviation emissions” ]
[ bioenergia ]
[ biodiversidad ]
[ biodiversity ]
[ biochar ]
[ biocarbon ]
[ "biofuels" ]
[ "carbon capture" ]
[ "captura y almacenamiento de
carbono" ]
[ "captura de carbono" ]
[“carbón dioxide removal”
[ "climate intervention" ]
[ "climate Justice" ]
[ "climate
stabilization" ]
[ contrails ]
[ "environmental
engineering" ]
[ “Earth Systems” ]
[ “Emerging Technologies”]
[ “distributed energy” ]
[ “fossil fuel subsidies” ]
[ "ingenieria climatica"
]
[ geoingeniería ]
[ geoengineering ]
[ "justicia climatica" ]
[ “Net primary production” ]
[ “negative emissions” ]
[ "ocean fertilization"
]
[ “solar radiation management” ]
[ “sulphur aerosol” ]
[ "stratospheric sulfur
injection" ]
[ “sulfur aerosols” ]
[ climate justice mitigation]
[ climate justice technology ]
