When I began work on my honours thesis in receptor-ligand kinetics during my biology and biotechnology degree, in 1998, electronic journals were not on the minds of legitimate mainstream research scientists.  At the time, Carleton University introduced an extremely-beneficial agreement it had reached with the National Research Council to allow fourth year honours students working on their theses access to the NRC CISTI Library Stacks–as a government agency, the NRC CISTI library did provide services to the public, but the actual stacks were out of bounds, public patrons could only access the extensive resources in their East Ottawa library

facilities by submitting reference lists on paper and waiting for library staff to retrieve them.  As fourth year honours thesis students, we benefitted from the more intimate time we got to spend with the references, and the ability to follow the chain of research articles much faster.  Remember, this was all during a time when there was no way to conduct research comprehensively in one pass;

you simply had to look up a set of initial promising-looking references, find only about 75% of them are in the library collection to begin with, and a further 25% are misplaced, out for binding, or waiting to be returned from the photocopy room.  And even then, you had very little idea whether those articles were of any value at all until you actually read them.  Only then, could you begin to make a second generation of references to look for, based on that first pass.

Normal research papers would take several passes of this process, and although the library was open every night until 23h (Walden University’s Librarians still provide personalized research reference services by telephone and email until 1am!).  This is one aspect of the rigorous research process that consumed the lion’s share of time it took to conduct research, and emphasized in us as developing researchers, the importance of the iterative critical evaluation process.

The young students nowadays probably can’t even conceive of what tremendous effort this research process necessarily was, and that you couldn’t rush journals to come back from the bindery or being located misplaced on shelves.  Today’s generation of young students has not only the belief, but the expectation, that an entire legitimately-researched and supported scholarly paper can be–indeed, many of them even believe that it should be–researched defensibly in one pass.  Although databases like ProQuest, LexisNexis, and ScienceDirect do indeed facilitate and vastly improve research productivity.  But the new generation of computer-based journal databases and their reliance on keyword searches and abstracts undermines the significantly-more valid critical process of evaluating references for their actual findings and content before dismissing a reference, considering it further, or determining what articles to follow next in the chain.  I encourage Interested students to visit the following resources to on literature surveys and research skills:

Dear Robin Cheung,

Thank you for taking part in our eBook survey at the Springer booth at Academy of Management 2010 in Montreal.

Your feedback was a valuable source in getting more information about the experiences with eBooks our readers already have. I am happy to announce that you are the winner of the Kindle 2. Congratulations!

Please inform us about your shipping address so we can send it to you.

You then will receive the Kindle within the next few weeks by mail. Enjoy reading Springer eBbooks and eJournals! More than 20.000 Springer eBooks are available in Kindle format at Amazon. Please make also sure you will have access to our eProducts through your library. You and your librarian can find more information here: http://www.springer.com/librarians/e-content/ebooks?SGWID=0-40791-0-0-0

Best regards,

Margit Dann, Springer Product Manager

After I had tried, for a few months, to use Sony’s PRS-505 eBook reader, the frustration of being unable to highlight research or add marginalia meant I was still printing out research and annotating by hand; the eBook reader’s ability to bring around myriad research papers to read whilst out of the home or office is entirely eclipsed by the inability to highlight or even recall later which reference had the interesting bit of information you wanted to remember.

But the Amazon Kindle 2, which has wireless support here in Canada, does support highlighting, though by a slightly-annoying five-direction “joystick” that you can really only reliably manipulate by reoriented the edge of a fingernail to catch on. And it does have a keyboard, though the linear layout is quite uncomfortable to type much more than a few words, unlike the curved keyboard of the original 1990s Blackberries.

All that remains now is for Mendeley to improve the core paradigm that it based its schema on, and someone to leverage the open API access they recently launched and write a value-added application to let us accomplish more than just reading and annotating on Kindle, but then due to the Kindle’s non-support of native PDF, manually re-annotating on Mendeley, where we might eventually be managing both the PDF and the citation. And for journal publishers, like Springer, to facilitate adoption of these devices into the research workflow; they allow much more ready-access, portability, and confidence in citations–everything that is research.

The Kindle provides a way for established researchers to improve portability, availability, and accountability by facilitating the migration to electronic journals.  In my bachelors honours thesis days, I could legitimately get away with photocopying all the journal articles that supported my research (the rule of thumb most professors expected was approximately one scholarly reference cited directly for each  page your paper was in length), since I might have one or two 30-page (article-length) papers for a whole term, and only one thesis around 100 pages in length.  I could easily handle annotating in the margins by hand, putting a phrase or two in big letters on the first page of each so I could find each reference at a glance, and filed in file boxes.

When I began working on my PhD, I began to find that my old system was too inefficient. It was simply taking too much time and to try to locate a single reference that I needed to support a single fact I needed to assert.  Even worse: when I tried to find a reference from which to synthesize and deduce a specific application of theory, requiring more than one paper to support and qualify restrictions on applicability, it become virtually impossible to locate all the references in a reasonable amount of time.  And managing the mountain of file-boxes in my spartan accommodations was more than my meagre Toronto basement rental could accommodate.

(I think people have a bit of a misconception of what a doctorate is intended to do and what it involves.  Writing doctoral-level papers does not simply mean more complex; in fact, complexity is not a requirement for doctoral work–it’s more a symptom.  Doctoral work must be appropriately-specific so that a reasonable-length 200-page dissertation can be authoritative and comprehensive, but stay within scope. Doctoral work, in start opposition to my MBA work, requires not only every assertion you make to be supported with reliable references, but that you demonstrate that your assertion is supported by all relevant accepted theory. So when people believe that doctoral level work is simply the same as bachelors, undergraduate work, that is simply not the case.  Whilst your Bachelors degree aims to develop higher order reasoning with a certain known introduction to a body of knowledge, to earn a doctorate, candidates must develop rigorous research skills, develop rigorous scholarly reasoning to ensure research is maximally-valid, and apply research to produce a dissertation that must demonstrate a significant, scientifically-valid contribution to humanity’s body of knowledge that was not shown before.)

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