• http://www.materials360online.com/

When you are doing a literature search on a specific topic you can use www.isiknowledge.com (choose the web of science option) or scholar.google.com. I prefer isiknowledge.com. Here are some strategies:

• Search for key words in the title/abstract
• Find a recent paper (last two or three years) and then start looking up the references. This is a quick way to find the key influential papers in a field.
• Start with a very influential paper (something that is cited hundreds of times) and then see who has cited this paper recently.

Whenever there are too many hits, try limiting to some of the more important journals, for example:

• Science. The OSU e-journal subscription only goes back about 15 years, JSTOR should have everything else)
• Nature
• Nature Nanotechnology - (Ethan has a subscription - OSU does not)
• Nature Physics
• Nature Materials
• Nature Biotechnology
• Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS)
• Physical Review Letters
• Nano Letters
• Journal of the American Chemical Society
• Applied Physics Letters
• Advanced Materials
• physical review B
• Nanotechnology
• Nanoscale
• Nano Research
• journal of applied physics
• journal of physical chemistry C
• analytical chemistry

You will have access to most of these journals if you use Oregon State wifi, or use an Oregon State computer. To access from home, see the instructions below.

https://oregonstate.teamdynamix.com/TDClient/KB/?CategoryID=6889

OSU has online access to most major journals, but exceptions include Nature Physics, Nature Nanotechnology, Nature Communications, and Nanotechnology. If OSU is not subscribed to the journal you want to read, go to this website to request an interlibrary loan. This will take one or two days. Someone will scan the article for you and email you a copy. The service is free.

To lobby for access to journals, contact the Physical & Mathematical Sciences Librarian at Oregon State University.

Many scientists are frustrated by the private journal system which make access to information (information which scientist generate through their research) prohibitively expensive. In the same spirit as the open source software movement, researchers publish their work on “the archives”. You can access the condensed matter archives at http://xxx.lanl.gov/archive/cond-mat.

When you are working on a specific experiment, it is important to watch the new literature as it is published. The ISI web of knowledge has an excellent (and free) service where they email you if someone cites a certain paper. For example, if you place an alert on the paper “Single molecule detection of a chemical reaction with a CNT”, you will be notified every time someone cites this paper.

For keeping up with a broad range of physics/nanotechnology topics, consider subscribing to email alerts from Science, Nature, Nature Nanotechnology, Nano Letters and the Virtual Journal of Nanoscience and Technology (CNT section). For journals published by the American Chemical Society use this e-mail alerts link.

If you don't subscribe to email alerts, you should set aside 2 hours a week to browse the table of contents of the online journals. You get new ideas. You find out what fields are hot. You learn what groups are active in your field.

When a researcher “reads” an article, they often do not read the whole thing. Here is a typical formula for quickly digesting the important points of an article

• 1. Read the title and abstract. Do you have an idea what they were doing? (If not, you might need to read the introduction)
• 2. Look at the figures. Do you see some convincing data?
• 3. Read the conclusion. Is it consistent with the data in the figures?
• 4. Do you need more details? Jump directly into the appropriate section (background, methods, discussion etc.)

Deciphering academese can be very amusing, see the famous PhD comic

Anatomy of bad science writing

Many of the new nanotechnology ideas that we read about in journals have an accompanying patent written by the same authors. The US Patent office website is workable, but rather awkward to use. A more user-friendly interface is http://www.freepatentsonline.com/

There is a growing number of journals that deal specifically with nanoscience and nanotechnology. See this comprehensive list. Here is a quick summary:

Good question! The answer is not clear.

Note peer reviewed:

• Nanoscale Research Letters (not peer reviewed? an interdisciplinary forum for communication, since Jan 2007, Impact factor 1.73)