Researching Issues related to climate geoengineering

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" ]