Reinventing wheels

[amnesiadust]

I've complained a lot about various obstacles in my slog through the academic career -- lots of "service work" not directly related to publishing papers, unsupportive advisors, generally being demoralized. I haven't discussed my own general ignorance very much, but increasingly I realize what a huge issue this is in my career at this point. While

Comments

[plummer]

I never have enough time to stay up with the literature. I'm always downloading papers and never reading them. I guess I had a similar experience as your Chi story. I had a paper, recently accepted with minor revisions, where I had struggled to explain what exactly I was doing with my conceptual analysis. I eventually coined a term, 'elaborations', as a label for what I was doing. Then I discovered a small body of literature with the perfect term (concept map) to describe what I was looking for. I just spent a chunk of time yesterday replacing my term with the previously defined term from a body of literature I hadn't been aware of.

[jrtom]

You and everyone else, man.

Someday I'm going to try to see if I can sell to Google the concept of a system to address this problem. Hell, I'd like to start with being able to provide a paper, or even an abstract, as a search 'query' ("find me more like this").

[judovitch]

IMHO literature searches are overrated. Most of what's out there is crap that you'd need to re-do anyway, even if they were working on exactly the same problem in exactly the same way. The only reason I ever did literature searches was to pad out my citations enough so I didn't mortally offend some far-off academic who might be refereeing my paper or approving my conference submission. So don't feel bad! :)

indeed

[amnesiadust]

Well, there's that too. :) Thanks for the encouragement