My Favourite Tipples from a Medical Research Specialist
Jinfo Blog

By Geraldine Clement-Stoneham

Abstract

My Favourite Tipples are shared by Geraldine Clement-Stoneham, knowledge and information manager at the Medical Research Council UK. She shares her favourite online resources in areas from horizon scanning and political intelligence to French "bandes dessinées".

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My favourite online resources reflect the focus of my work, and a need for solutions that transfer between platforms.

• Feedly: With a crowded inbox, I prefer to pull information through RSS feeds rather than email alerts. To replace Google Reader I have settled on Feedly, which works well with my iPad or in a web browser, and makes it easy to share links.

• RSS feed: To set up RSS feeds from Google Alerts, set them as email alert first, and look out for the link at the bottom of each message labelled "Receive this alert as RSS feed". The hyperlink can be added to any reader. I am not sure this is an official workaround, but it does the job quite nicely!

• Dods Monitor: In order to keep up with life in Westminster, for example to follow relevant Parliament debates, or to keep an eye on new official publications such as white papers, I use Dods Monitor. Dods is a commercial service, which describes itself as a provider of "market-leading political intelligence". It saves me previous time instead of doing manual monitoring!

• My horizon scanning would not be complete without some resources specific to the research world. For this I turn to Research Fortnight and the Times Higher Education. And to check on the latest medical research discoveries, I have an RSS feed set up on Europe PubMed Central, which is an open access repository co-funded by the Medical Research Council and a group of 25 biomedical research funders.

• Diigo: To organise my own references, I use Diigo. As a bookmark manager, it provides some smart features, like the flexibility of assigning tags, organise references in groups and/or list, and share these groups with others, who can also contribute if they wish. And when I get to download a full publication in PDF, I will file this in Papers, my favourite bibliographic software (though I am considering moving to Zotero, which is open source).

• Iznéo: Now, I will end on a lighter touch, as I can assure you I am not all work and no fun! If you are a French speaker, or a francophile, and enjoy "bandes dessinées", look up, Iznéo, an online library of "BD numériques". I highly recommend it. Commuting journeys have never felt shorter!

An article I found in FreePint that I found particularly interesting:

ThinkStoryline! - Putting the Conclusion at the Heart of the Presentation. This article interested me as it talked about the importance of having a narrative line in your presentations, and provided a précis of the ThinkStoryline! methodology.

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