I find myself wanting to read more outside of my textbooks…
Any suggestions?
Thanks!
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My regular intake…
Magazines…roughly in order
Discover (Used to be at least 1 year ahead of everyone else)
Scientific American: Mind
Psychology
Scientific American
Popular Science
Popular Mechanics
Wired
Psychology Today
Websites…
Each magazine has a good site.
IFLS (I Fucking Love Science)
Seed (Awesome when it to be a magazine, it’s now wholely online, i haven’t kept up with it)
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I just read the blurbs posted to my Facebook wall or aggregated by one of the news services, but contributing journals include
The Kavli Foundation
Physics Today
USGS
Science
and then the usual pop sci stuff.
IEEE Spectrum is great (it’s their “general-interest” publication), but a bit outside your primary field of interest, I imagine.
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Ashley,
I find myself wanting to read more outside of my textbooks… Any suggestions?
The publication Nature is probably more suited for your major than Science. Otherwise, you can either go to Amazon and start looking up your textbooks and then look at the “Customers Who Have Plenty of Dough Bought This Item Also” section.
Here is one of my textbooks:
You can also surf around to more specific interests like plasma medicine, bacteriophages, antibiotic resistance, nanomedicine etc. and use the Look Inside! feature to judge what is worth getting. You can also use the Interlibrary Loan to check out the physical book for free - just be sure you fill out the “Not Needed After Date” as far out as you can as that will wind up being your due date. (I put in a request for the above book and Dec 31st as the date)
And / or you can go to the McDermott Library page at UTD and click on the Articles and Databases link to find specific scientific paper searches by Subject. In your case, Biology and Medicine & Health are worth checking out. Then the database searches are listed; Scopus and Biology Powersearch look promising, but it can be tricky sometimes to get the actual PDF file. (it can be like playing Whack a Mole with links, but I can show you how to give up it’s secrets)
Also, I review some recent books that have a cutting edge biology basis here:
JAG “Tracer Bullet - Professional Nano Detective” MAN
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I would second this recommendation, but it raises an interesting point.
Science has become an incredibly specialized field of endeavour, and it no longer really possible for a practitioner in one field to have much more then a college educated laymen’s understanding of the current state of the art in other, unrelated fields. The reason is simple, the journals where the cutting edge research is hashed out are narrowly focused with only the major standouts ever really showing up in the more general focused journals like Nature.
I believe you have said elsewhere that you are still a student, which means you have access to journals through the University. Take advantage of that and peruse as many as you can find time for that are in the vacinity of the fields you are interested in. Once you leave University and enter the commercial world you will no longer have free access to such a wide variety of fields current journals. And it is very costly to try to retain such access.
As a laymen’s general magazine, I find Science News, which is a weekly publication, to be the most useful for identifying ‘big’ items from other fields that may be worth looking up the original journal articles.
Out of curiosity, what is your major and intended use of this major?
I would have mentioned “Nature,” but I don’t read it a lot these days. As Walter indicates, reading a wide range of professional journals is something not so practical to do outside of academia.
I went to the Salvation Army Thrift Store yesterday, and bought some reference books that you might like to see (or, barring that, you could use them for your morning weight-lifting routine). The two heaviest books are reference manuals for emergency medicine; they weigh slightly more than my lunch. A third book is on neural procedures. I plan to bring these books by the Science area this weekend, when I can borrow a forklift to move them.
Lately, Quarks to Quasars has been inundating my feed with so much of the good stuff I can’t even get through it all.
Space/Physics/Math/Tech Youtubers that I tune into:
StarTalk
Motherboard
SpaceTime
Veritasium
Vihart
And I CAN’T suggest it enough, but an audible account is AWESOME. They post college lectures and also have a TON of books. I’ll add you to my account if you want. <3
(Also NONE of those recommendations are journals…sorry…)
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Something else you might like to read are any of Richard Feynman’s books. His primary field of interest was physics, but he liked to study everything. He was a good writer, and his books are entertaining. You might begin with “Surely, You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman.”
I will have to look into this!
I have been looking up random subjects this way, but I want to have a magazine that has recent scientific papers…kind of like a TMZ but with research, lol.
I have read Science News before, I need to bookmark there website or see how I can get my hands on a physical copy for free or cheap…
I’m studying Biology at UTD! I’m hoping to get into a Physician Assistants program when I graduate… and I LOVE reference books. Pretty much all of the books I have purchased in the last couple of years that weren’t for school were reference books 0 I really want to get my hands on the new DSM; and let me know when you find that forklift…I would like to look through that emergency medicine manual…
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Coursea is the MOOC college level type site I love, since classes are free - priced right. But there are courses were you pay a minimal amount to get a certificate from. Units don’t count towards a degree (that I’m aware of) but I’m sure they could be added to resumes and provided to employers to show you are improving and maintaining skills.
I’ve taken several just because they are of interest to me. There’s some other sites, I just tend to stay with one as my email box is full enough of things that interest me.
I get some professional trade magazines on manufacturing and quality assurance, some free some not.
One strategy is to read a semi-popular publication such as SciAm or SciNews, & then use the pieces that interest you as a guide for more in-depth study. You can also do this on-line – I frequently look at an article on a subject, & then click through to the academic paper referenced in it. If they don’t have a link to the paper, I consider that they haven’t done their job.
All too frequently the best you can find online for a peer reviewed article is the abstract. At least without paying a fee to read the full article. Not to derail the OP, but the majority of modern cutting edge research is only showing up in for profit journals. It is the primary reason, academic access makes such a big difference in what access you have if you don’t subscribe to the journals.
Also, I presume when the OP was asking about “scientific journals” she was referring to peer reviewed journals. Most of the publications mentioned in this thread, including the Science News, I mentioned do not actually meet that definition.
BTW, if you have an Amazon account, science news is available as a kindle subscription ($2.25 per month). Relatively cheap and one of the best places to find a survey of the current cutting edge science in all areas.
Ashley,
I have been looking up random subjects this way, but I want to have a magazine that has recent scientific papers…kind of like a TMZ but with research, lol.
So an online journal that talks about which scientists are more likely to get a divorce, been seen hanging out with a rogue research group, put on a few pounds, etc. ?
But there are a LOT of journals out there that publish the latest monthly research. It sounds like you want at least one “broadband” journal that covers a variety of topics, (I like Physics Today) but are you also looking for something more specialized? (for instance a subject on nanofluidic polymer research for biosensors)
On LinkedIn, you can subscribe to a variety of groups that will be glad to fill your Inbox with the latest research on everything from Microscopy to Environmental Science and it is pretty current. (like that day, science pimps)
JAG “Tracer Bullet Gets Framed” MAN
Since she’s in a university setting, she can look up the original article through the library if there’s not a click-through link ; but a lot of stuff is being published now in open- or quasi-open-access journals.
She is currently in a University setting, which is why I suggested she make as much use of the resource as she can, while she can.
When she enters the commercial world, such free access to information will be greatly curtailed.
Few of the journals I read, and neither of the two I provide peer review for, are ‘open’. They provide abstracts online, but your must be a subscriber or pay for a copy of the actual articles. From the conversations I have with others, it seems that very few of the peer reviewed journals are ‘open’ and that the very concept of an ‘open’ peer reviewed journal is pretty new. Hopefully it will take over, but I don’t believe it is the current norm.
Some reputable open journals are arXiv and PLOS.
http://arxiv.org/
https://www.plos.org/
A not-so-reputable open journal is anything published by Bentham. I know of them mostly through my arguing with 9/11 Truthers.
I browse arXiv and http://gitxiv.com/
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OK, Ashley, here you go! I put three books on the top shelf of Science Committee’s bookcase. I think they weigh five or eight pounds apiece. They are also surprisingly current; “Principles” is Copyright 2000, and “Rosen’s” is Copyright 2010.
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Aww, G Harry Stine’s Handbook of Model Rocketry!
6th Ed is 1994, which would have been one of the last things he published.