Thomson’s Web of Science (WOS) is obviously a useful tool. Those of us born post-1980 have heard the dreaded tales of trying to follow citations through printed copies of Chemical Abstracts (fun times). With the advent of RSS feeds and citation databases such as Endnote and Bibtex, keeping up to date with current research and writing well referenced papers becomes almost effortless. The major flaw in WOS is trying to follow the works of one author. It’s tough enough for initial-less authors such as myself (I wish I had been forewarned before publishing my first paper), but if they are Asian, just give up. So to complement WOS, Researcher-ID emerged. Anyone can freely register, state your current affiliation and link all published works on Web of Science. Hopefully this will eventually be fully integrated so that author-sets automatically appear when searched in WOS. The membership seems quite low at the moment, but here I am. Perhaps this marks the beginning of scientific social networking?
In seven days I ship off to New Orleans for the APS meeting and also tick another year off on my life’s punch-card. Twenty six is too close to thirty for my liking.