As part of our lab meetings we discuss recent articles of interest. These articles are generally in ecological statistics, though they may be in fields relating to our projects (e.g., Bayesian inference). My students asked how to find articles, and so I thought I’d list some of the sources I keep an eye on.
I (try to) stay up to date with the articles published in the following journals:
- Biometrics
- Methods in Ecology and Evolution
- Journal of Agricultural, Biological, and Environmental Statistics
- Environmental and Ecological Statistics
- Biometrika (to a lesser degree)
- The Auk (mostly because I like birds)
Other journals that I should be watching include:
- Ecology
- Journal of Wildlife Management
But, there is only so much time in the day. The easiest way to keep up with what’s published in these journals is to subscribe to the table of contents alerts. For example, alerts for JABES can be requested by providing your e-mail address on the journal’s webpage.
The other good way to find recent articles is to search for specific authors or to look for new articles that cite old articles of interest. There are several tools that do this including the Web of Science and Google Scholar. These tools have different features and both have advantages and disadvantages. For example, the Web of Science allows you to limit searches by the field of the publication. On the other hand, Google Scholar provides tools that alert you when a specific author publishes new papers or is cited by other authors. For example, I use Google Scholar to follow the articles and citations of Bill Link from the USGS one of the leaders in Bayesian inference for the analysis of ecological data.
Several organizations also provide unified portals for journal alerts and allow for alerts using keyword searches as well (e.g. Zetoc). I have never used these myself. Just another thing to do!
Please feel free to comment if you think I’ve missed something important. It would be great to get more ideas.