Wraping up

Answering Questions

I'm sure that somewhere in all my ramblings I have covered the questions posed by Prof. Marsteller but I thought I should go through and try to get the ideas organized.

1. Where might you find a more complete description of their research?

The Internet truly is amazing. I found that one of the best places to find out about my scientist's research is her website. Her page has a statement of her research interests, a few citations of publications (no links) and links to her lab and personal web page.

The monkey lab page is much more extensive than the short bio page. Here she has posted bios of all her lab assistants, descriptions of their current research, a list of publications with PDF links, and links to other labs and her field stations.

Also linked from her main web page is her personal page. This is very similar to the monkey lab page. Here she posts publication links (some with PDF links but not as up to date as the monkey lab site), short bios of the Comparative Cognition Laboratory workers (graduate students mostly), and this is also where her CV is posted.

Investigating this site and the links alone would give anyone interested in this type of work a wealth of information.

2. Can you see any patterns in their literature use?

Dr. Santos has cited publications related to cognition both human and animal, animal science and behavior, psychology, brain science, language, and human development. From my brief survey of her publications for this assignment it seems she cites "Cognition" and "Animal Behavior" quite a bit.


3. Would they serendipitously scan for ideas? Where?

If she scans for ideas it would probably be form journals that are related to her research but that do not directly cover it, such as some of the human development journals. Because she is interested in the evolution of cognition and psychology reviewing the work of scientists that deals with infants and children could lead to interesting insight to non-human research. Also, Dr. Santos is on the editorial board of at least one on-line publication and she lists many publications for which she is an ad hoc reviewer; these too would serve as sources for idea discovery.

4. Where might they systematically look for information?

It is probably in the journals that she cites more frequently that Dr. Santos looks systematically for information. While I couldn't find which organizations to which she has membership it would be very unlikely that she does not belong to any. I'm sure she receives newsletters, publications and even list-serve e-mails from these associations. I know she attends conferences as her CV lists papers she has presented at conferences such as the International Primatological Society and the International Conference On Comparative Cognition. She probably also looks at the research her colleagues are publishing via their web sites.

5. Are there interdisciplinary aspects to their work? If so, how would this complicate their information seeking behavior?

In Dr Santos' own words

My research explores the evolutionary origins of the human mind by comparing the cognitive abilities of human and non-human primates. It provides an interface between evolutionary biology, developmental psychology and cognitive neuroscience. My experiments focus on non-human primates (in captivity and in the field) incorporating methodologies from cognitive development, animal learning psychology, and cognitive neuroscience.

While these are related fields anyone exploring the evolution of cognition would have to keep appraised of research being done with humans and non-humans. An information seeker would also have to look in journals that deal with the physical structure of the brain as well as behavior patterns.

6. Is there a possibility that their work pulls information from sub-disciplines or disciplines that have historically been working somewhat in isolation from one another?

I'm not sure how disparate these would be but I noticed that Dr. Santos' work in cognition pulls from research done in sub-disciplines such as language acquisition, child development and primate behavior. I would guess that these fields are not entirely isolated from one another but do overlap to some degree.

7. Is there any evidence that they participate in some form of social (computerized or otherwise) networking – especially ones where they are exchanging information with colleagues?

I did not find any direct evidence of social networking, however Dr. Santos has links on her web page to many of her colleagues web-pages (both at Yale and other institutions), has co-written many papers, and as mentioned above has presented papers at conferences.

8. Are the journals, or other information that they are citing, open access?
Dr. Santos cites journals that are both open access and publisher restricted.

Many of the journals cited are published by the APA. APA journals are available free on their web site -

Some of the other journals she cites are from publishers such as Elsevier which allow the author to archive pre- and post-publication; these type of articles may be available on sites such as PubMed, a personal web page like Dr. Santos' own, or a university repository. But many times this type of archiving can be difficult to discover, part of the "hidden web".

Recommendations

If I were asked by a patron to help with research in this field, after my initial moment of panic, I would probably start them off with an EBSCO search using PsycARTICLES, Psychology & Behavioral Sciences Collection, PsycINFO, Medline, Philosopher's Index, and Biological Abstracts. If we were not in a library with access to those EBSCO options I might start them off with a Google Scholar search. I would also suggest looking at APA's offerings. While we were exploring one of those options I would calm down and remember how helpful PubMed can be and direct the patron there as well. Once the patron found a some useful articles I would suggest checking the authors in the ISI to see who is frequently cited; this would give the patron an idea of who's work is being most widely read by others in the field. I would also encourage them to look for authors' web sites. If the patron was not just doing one research paper but really planned to delve into the field, I would also suggest setting up a "comprehensive" Google news alert (scanning regular news, blogs, groups, etc.) with keywords such as "primate cognition" and "evolutionary psychology".

Open Access, PubMed, PLoS and Sherpa

Professor Marsteller gave me a lot to think about in the last lecture, particularly on the topic of open access.

I notices other classmates mentioned being able to link to published work from their scientist's CV; I was not so lucky. However, Dr. Santos does have some PDF files of her articles on her website. The most current citation is from 2003. She really needs to update as I know from database searches she has published work up to at least the end of 2008. It is this type of personal or academic archived work that I used to think of as open access. I was unaware that there were entire databases and even journals that published as OA.

What an "Ah-ha" moment when I explored PubMed. Why didn't I know about this before? This is an amazing resource and I will be spreading the word. I was on this site for hours. It has lots of links and I especially like the related articles function. To know that this is available to the general public is great. Many articles are even available full text. Someone without access to an academic library can still find information and if it is not freely available the patron can try to get it on Inter-library Loan.
Of course I did a search for my scientist and came up with many articles that I found on the academic databases but when I limited my results to full text articles I only got two hits. I did find that the limit to full text did not extend to the related articles feature. But it is fairly easy to pick them out due to the green Free article link under the citation.

Another good resource I explored is the PLoS, Public Library of Science. They publish seven fully open access peer-reviewed journals. They also "deposit" works in PubMed upon publication. They offer RSS feeds to help researchers stay up to date. One of their publications, PLoS Computational Biology, is an official journal of the International Society for Computational Biology and includes Dr. Santos on the editorial board.

Sherpa/RoMEO is a great way to find which publishers support open access. I found it a little difficult to navigate at first because I wasn't sure how this site might be used. I can see if someone wants to advance the open access agenda that they would want to find out which publications support open access. But it really didn't click until I read that some grants would require the author to also have their research available in an open access venue; such as an NIH's requirement that grant recipients submit their work to PubMed. I did look at Dr. Santo's CV to see if any of her grants may have had this sort of requirement but even after poking around for quite a while I couldn't determine this.

dead ends, frustrations and getting the hang of ISI

Well I've been pretty frustrated this week. Hoping to get some suggestions from this week's lectures I popped into ISI. I actually have access to Science Citation Index from work and I tried it at the suggestion of one of my co-workers but had no luck. I thought I would try again to see if maybe I would have more success after exploring with short assignment two. Still nothing.

Luckily I decided to download "Publish or Perish". I found many articles by my scientist have indeed been cited. It seems that in the ISI databases she is Santos LR (first initial, middle initial) and not Santos LA* (truncated first name) as I assumed. I didn't even discover this when I tried the ISI author search function as I was looking for her full name alphabetically (silly library student). I should have known from Prof. Marsteller's anecdote about the Google Scholar and his discovery that his name was being misspelled.

Google Scholar is another spot I checked out a while ago but didn't feel like I had much success with. I didn't notice the name listing only that the articles I came up with were pretty much what I found in my library search and with many I couldn't access the full text as I could with the library finds. When I finally had the name thing figured out I discovered that yes my scientist has been cited. In fact several of her articles have be cited upwards of 20 times. Although she did not show up in the Researcher ID area or Essential Science Indicators. Maybe I'm doing something wrong there too?

One of the features that I think would be of particular interest to someone new to the field would be the "related records" function. If you start from one article not only can you go backward and forward with citations but you can also find articles that would most likely be related to your starting point through shared citations. Most likely if the new article is citing similar work the topic and focus of the paper will also be similar. In this way you can see what others in the field are doing.

Doing the citation search also yields possible subject headings. For my search on Laurie Santos the articles were tagged in 18 different subject area. Having looked at many of her articles through EBSCO I knew I could exclude several such as Tropical Medicine and Public, Environmental and Occupational Health. However, if I had not known that Dr. Santos most recent writing focused on the economic behavior of non-human primates I would have excluded the Economics area. I would suggest to any new explorer to check unusual subject areas in case a scientist has branched out or who's work may be multidisciplinary. These unusual subject areas may lead to unanticipated resources.

professional organizations and associations

This week I feel like I hit a bit of a road block. I finally decided revisit Dr. Santos’ CV and analyze her connections to professional organizations. All professions have related organizations and because academic fields are focused on exploring and sharing ideas they have more than commercial fields. Many of the publications that have published Dr. Santos’ work have related associations. Membership in organizations such as this includes such benefits as newsletters, job listings, and membership directories. Every organization that I looked into offers lower membership dues for students. Most of the organizations also host conferences. They also have websites, many of which have information and links open to all. These would be good places for someone new to the field to explore. The main problem would be choosing which organizations to join.

Of course the American Psychological Association is the largest and most well known of the organizations and they publish a laundry list of journals as well as books and videos. Their website is quite extensive with a separate area for students, lists of conferences, news feeds, career information and more. It has a lot of interesting information for even a layperson such as me.

It is interesting to note that the list of publications on which Dr. Santos has been an ad hoc reviewer is longer than the list in which she has been published and includes titles that seem to fall a little outside her main research focus. I’m sure that reading slightly outside her discipline has sparked ideas. As I mentioned last time there is a leaning to child and infant behavior, cognition and psychology.

Almost all of Dr. Santos’ speaking engagements have been at university sponsored lecture series and Colloquia. One association that is listed as hosting a meeting is the Society for Philosophy and Psychology. This organization is fairly inexpensive to join, hosts two list-serves, one for association news and another with info about other conferences and calls for papers from organizations that may be of interest to members. However it has no associated publications.

Publications that have published Dr. Santos’ work and their related associations:

• Animal Behaviour – Animal Behavior Society
• Developmental Psychology – American Psychological Association
• Journal of Comparative Psychology – American Psychological Association
• Cognitive Science – Cognitive Science Society

Publications for which Dr. Santos has been an ad hoc reviewer and their associations:

• Behavioral and Brain Sciences – Behavioral and Brain Sciences
• Child Development – Society for Research in Child Development
• Child Development Perspectives – Society for Research in child Development
• Infancy – International Society on Infant Studies