Differential Equations


Spring 2008

Research Exercise


Please do this by Monday 7 April, 2008


An important and challenging aspect of research of any sort is organizing your sources. There are two online tools that can help with this. I would like you to experiment with these tools during this course. I suspect that many of you will find these to be extremely useful resources, long after this class is over.

  1. Sign up for accounts on the following two sites:
    1. del.icio.us
    2. citeulike.org
    Accounts are free. Please see comments below about user-names.

  2. Let me know your user-name on both sites. You can either email me your user-name, or add me to your network. I am dpfeldman on delicious and dpf on citeulike.

  3. To get some idea about what these websites offer, read the following
    1. Keeping Citations Straight, and Finding New Ones, Inside Higher Education, January 31, 2008.
    2. how delicious is changing academic research. unimaginable Inscape, Jo Guldi, March 22, 2008.
    3. Wikipedia entry on citeulike
    4. Wikipedia entry on del.icio.us

I recommend that you choose a user-names that aren't too goofy. Citeulike is a way of collecting and sharing a bibliography. You might want to share this bibliography with friends, potential employers or clients, researchers you meet at conferences or online, and so on. So you should choose a user-name that you would feel comfortable sharing---one that is unlikely to make others think you are crazy or unprofessional. For example, if you were setting up a user account on ebay to sell some stuff, you might choose a colorful or fun name, but not to such an extent that potential customers might be hesitant to do business with you.

On a related note, I'd encourage not being anonymous. You don't have to give your real name on these sites, and if you don't want to put your real name online for any reason, by all means don't. But I think you will be slightly more credible as a source of information for others if you list your real name somewhere. Social bookmarking sites like these work best when they create a community. Arguably, it's easier to do so when users have some idea whom they're interacting with.

Have fun!