Good communication is part of our jobs as researchers. And communicating well, in 2009, means having an effective web presence.

When I read someone’s paper, and I like it, I want to know who the person is. Sometimes it is merely to find out if they produced more similar work, or else, it can be to understand the context of their ideas. And I am constantly frustrated by people who shy away from even offering a simple publication list to the world!

Are you happy, just being from school Omega? David Parry urges us to do better:

Think about this as rather than being a professor from Omega university who writes about Legal Institutions in Meerkat Communities, you can be a professor who writes about Meerkats and the Law and who is associated with Omega university.

In short, researchers rely on their school and their publishers to broadcast their information. David is saying that it is suboptimal both for you and for the community. 

Stop saying you are “John from school X”. Say that you are “John who works on problem  Y”. Don’t rely on your employer to carry your message!

I want to know when a new research paper…

• is similar to one of my papers;
• cites one of my papers;
• is relevant to my current research.

Why can’t I have this already? Why do I have to manually go to Google Scholar to monitor what my peers are doing? But Google Scholar always fall short because it does not know Daniel Lemire is as a researcher. 

Years of research in Natural Language Processing should make the construction of such a tool almost as easy as building a bridge. It is not difficult to parse my research papers, learn from it, and detect similar papers as they appear on the net.

So we need a new generation of tools:

• The tool knows who the researcher is, what he published, what he cited…
• The tool knows what the researcher is currently working upon.
• The tool can filter and aggregate the data automatically and offer it to the researcher without effort.
• The tool promotes open access content when possible.

I would pay for such a tool.