Literature Search II: Keep you up in Research – the Virtual Journals and RSS Feeds!

We know how to search relevant papers but science is a very fast developing field, especially the optic communities. To keep up we have to know what is published but we can´t do every week an extensive literature search. The solution is very easy but still satisfying: virtual journals and RSS feeds!

A virtual journal presents an online collection of relevant papers from different journals published during the last week or month. In physics the virtual journals by the American Institute of Physics (AIP) and the American Physical Society (APS) are very good, covering 5 topical areas:

virtual journals

For optics it is called:

virtual journal of ultrafast science

But also the ones for quantum information and nanoscale science contain a lot of optic papers:
virtual journal of quantum information
virtual journal of nanoscale science & technology
The first two mentioned are updated every month, the nanoscale science even every week! But although virtual journals present a good overview about relevant and interesting papers for the community, papers relevant to our work are perhaps (or mostly) not published there. Hence, we have to find an additional way to search relevant papers for us… and RSS feeds will help us a lot.


RSS feeds stands for “Really Simple Syndication” and are placed on many web-pages today. They provide you with the newest articles, information and news on the web-page. You only have to click on the RSS logo and then you can create a folder in the favorite of your browser. Today, more convenient is to connect them directly to your email client or reader. All advanced clients or readers support them (if you don’t have one, search for thunderbird or google reader). Really powerful are RSS feeds if you combine them with word-filters of your email client/reader program! Using the keywords of your research, your email/ reader program collects directly all relevant papers out of hundreds of papers. You don’t have to check them all personally.

Enjoy the lecture ;)!

Very Short Pulses – from Attoseconds to Yoctoseconds!

Coincidentally I noticed a headline:

“Yoctosecond Photon Pulses from Quark-Gluon Plasmas ” [1]

Like many optic scientists I am working with femtosecond laser pulses (1fs=10^-15). Many comrades in my group are dealing with attoseconds (10^-18s). They generate them in high harmonic generation processes and can push them down to around 80as [2,3]! Near to the frontier of the zeptoseconds (10^-21s) scale. In 1as light can travel a distance of 3*10^-10m, which corresponds roughly to the length of three hydrogen atoms. Today, 80as are the limit because of physical reasons in the high harmonic generation process. But new methods are in progress to reach the zeptoseconds scale. Now, a group has proposed a method how to generated yoctoseconds; 1ys is 10^-24 seconds! They describe how high-energetic photon pulses down to the yoctosecond time scale can be produced in heavy-ion collisions, particularly during the formation of a quark-gluon plasma.
How to measure (and to produce them in reality!) and to characterize these yoctosecond pulses… future will know it. However, my comrades have enough to struggle with 80as ;).

[1] Phys. Rev. Lett. 103, 152301 (2009)
[2] Science Vol. 320, 1614
[3] Attoworld

Literature Search I: How to find Information concerning your Work!

Very essentially, often underestimated, most poorly done, about what am I talking? Of course of the literature search! The literature search is a very important and powerful tool and helps you to save a lot of time and performing good experiments. Three main purposes are behind a literature search:

1. Find information concerning your experiment achieved by other groups (part I).
2. Keep you up of the progress in your research field (part II).
3. Getting new ideas :) …

In this post I write about the first part, presenting some useful webpages for literature search. The second part follows end of the week (introducing the virtual journals).

Today, nearly all scientific information are online available in the internet. But the challenge is to find it! To do so, many search pages exist which are in parallel checking different databases about your request. Probably your university or institute offers such a search machine too. In science, probably the best search page is:

web of knowledge

The page is well done, user friendly and contains a lot of background information.
Another way (which I really like) is to search directly on the journal homepage. Every (good) journal has today a (advanced) search function. In Optics, most of the relevant articles are published in the journals of the “Optical Society of America” briefly OSA. The link to the journal page is:

Opticsinfobase

You can search on all journals or on specified ones. If you have found an interesting paper, have a look at its references and citings. They are often listed with titles and links to their PDFs. I am sure it contains a lot of interesting papers for you. With time you will notice an author who have several publications on the same field. Check their group homepage! Normally, their full publications list (even PDFs) is online.
An – unusual – approach is to search publications by google. Either by google, or its version for science:

scholar.google.com

It is not as good as the other possibilities, but I had already some nice surprises with scholar google.
Another exotic way but it is worth to mention it, is the:

arxiv server

Papers can there be pre-published before they are accepted or rejected by a journal. Some communities, like the quantum information one, are nearly publishing every article on this server too.
To complete the first part, I want to draw your attention to the:

Encyclopedia of Laser Physics and Technology

It is an open-access encyclopedia with around 570 articles, and it explains the physical principles and common techniques in laser technology.
At the end, please remember that every search machine is worthless if you use the wrong keywords. But with some training you will quickly learn the suitable ones ;).