10 Places to Find Cutting Edge Scientific Information

By Bonnie Juettner

When you write about certain subject areas – and I would put science at the top of that list -- you need up-to-date information. Where can you find fast, free cutting edge scientific information on the Internet? For starters, try these ten sites:

• Science Daily (http://www.sciencedaily.com/). Science Daily isn’t comprehensive – it covers mostly science news that is of popular interest, and won’t give you enough information if you are looking for a less media-friendly topic. But it’s a very good starting place and is updated daily.

• Science News (http://www.sciencenews.org/). Like Science Daily, Science News is frequently updated, and its home page does a good job of summarizing the most recent science news succinctly—giving you a snapshot of what’s been happening in the world, scientifically. Unlike Science Daily, Science News will also link you to book reviews and notable science blog entries.

• New Scientist (http://www.newscientist.com/) and Discover (http://discovermagazine.com/). New Scientist and Discover are both popularizers of the latest science news – and they offer fairly long excerpts of articles even to nonsubscribers (if you are a subscriber, though, you’ll get more out of these sites). These are good sites to check out if you are looking for something that you know has received a lot of media attention, and they are often rich in video features and cool graphic sidebars that contain amazing “did you know?” facts. They aren’t the best place to look, however, if what you need to know is relatively obscure. They are, however, perfect spots to look for in depth explanations of topics that have been in the news—as is Scientific American, below.

• Scientific American (http://www.scientificamerican.com/). Scientific American is one step beyond New Scientist and Discover. It goes into a little more depth. One nice feature of SA is that it now offers brain research from its new spinoff, Scientific American Mind. It isn’t always easy to find brain research that a person can follow without actually being a brain surgeon – but this is one possibility. SA itself also offers a disproportionate number of articles on brain research, which apparently is becoming one of the magazine’s specialties. For example, a March 9 article (“Signals in a Storm” by Carl Schoonover) on the website shows how researchers are using computer imaging technology to see, molecule by molecule, how brain cells send signals to each other. As with New Scientist and Discover, you’ll get more out of SA if you subscribe, but you’ll be surprised at how much you can find out without a subscription – enough to drive the rest of your search, giving you new search terms and avenues to explore that you might not have thought of without a visit to the site. You may even manage to find the full text of a “subscription only” article somewhere else online, if you Google on the article’s title or use the online full text databases available through your local library (you DO have a library card, don’t you? If you have a few weeks in your research schedule, you may also be able to order hard copies of articles through your library, if you have the full citation).

• Science (http://www.sciencemag.org/). Science is for the truly hardcore. You can get a vast amount of information here without being a subscriber, but if you want full text of all Science’s articles, you will have to become a member of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. It’s worth it if you have the educational background to understand a lot of technical details – but even if you don’t, you will glean a lot from the abstracts and the daily Science Insider news updates. The site also offers free access to certain articles – for example, a nonsubscriber can currently read the full text of “Civilian Casualties in Afghanistan.” (http://www.sciencemag.org/site/feature/data/hottopics/afghanistan/). Of particular interest to those looking for truly cutting edge research is the ScienceXpress feature, which publishes selected Science papers electronically prior to their publication in the printed magazine—and sometimes even before the final changes to the papers have been made.

• Nature (http://www.nature.com/nature/index.html). Like Science, Nature is not fully accessible except to subscribers. Moreover, like Science, Nature offers full text articles on current science news. For example, on March 13, 2011, you could find full text articles on the earthquakes in Japan, sham samples being sent to seed banks, the European Court of Justice’s rejection of stem-cell patents, and gut bacteria.

• PhysLink (http://www.physlink.com/). PhysLink is the scholarly, physics and astronomy version of Science News and Science Daily. It isn’t an online news magazine, but it has links (hence the name) to recent published articles on topics that have been in the news (PhysLink pulls the articles into its site, so you stay at the site while reading from other sources). The sources are reputable: news releases from universities about recent research, NASA, NIST. On the day I wrote this article, the front page of PhysLink contained an MIT article on possible real-world applications for self-oscillating gels – gels that continuously change state without provocation, causing the entire gel to pulsate. When I clicked on the link to the original article, I not only found the article, but also video showing oscillating gels and experiments that researchers are doing with them.

• Scirus (http://www.scirus.com/). Google would be much more helpful if it would model itself after Scirus, the mother of all science search engines. When you search for a topic on Scirus, you not only get a list of results, but you also get a suggested list of filters on the left side of your page. You can choose to search only journal sources or only journal and/or “preferred” web sources. Preferred web sources include NASA, MIT’s OpenCourseware, and the like. Scirus also gives you the option to narrow your search using certain words and phrases that it determines have a tendency to crop up in your results. For example, I did a sample Scirus search for “tsunami,” and Scirus suggested that I might be particularly interested in sites that related to wave height, to seawalls, or to post traumatic stress. Google Scholar (http://scholar.google.com/) is a close second, but it doesn’t generate the automatic filtering suggestions that Scirus offers. Maybe automatic filtering will be offered when it comes out of its beta edition.

• The National Institutes of Health (http://www.nih.gov/). For medically-related information, you can’t go wrong with the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Here you can find news, research, and clinical trials (completed trials, ongoing trials, and trials that are currently recruiting). You can explore this site yourself to find out most of its offerings, but I want to highlight a little known aspect of the NIH website, its interest groups (http://www.nih.gov/sigs/sigs.html). The interest group links take you to other pages with even more specialized topic areas, and the links on the pages for those topic areas often lead to papers and forums related to the very latest research being done in those areas. This is a wonderful resource to know about. If you are interested in alternative medicine, you might like to know that the National Institutes of Health also offers an alternative medicine site, the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (http://nccam.nih.gov/). It’s not very comprehensive but is growing daily, and does let you know the “official story” on the effects of certain herbs and supplements.

• Amazon and/or Google Books. No, you often can’t get (at least not for free) the full text of books, especially cutting edge recently published scientific books at Amazon or Google Books – but often you can glean quite a bit of information from the excerpted previews. On the subject of books, if you do a lot of science writing, you will want to build up your own library of science reference books. One way to do that is to regularly watch used bookstore sites for textbooks and reference books that have just been re-released in a new edition. Once the new edition is out, you may be able to get a used copy of the old one for much less than you would have paid for a new copy (new science reference books are very pricey). You won’t want to rely on those out-of-date editions for cutting edge information, but they do very well as a starting point when you are beginning to research a topic that you know little about. Take note of the publication date, subtract a year to allow for the book’s production time, and perhaps another year to allow for the book’s research and writing time – and then update the information yourself as you extend your research.

There are a few other sites that you might want to bookmark for background research, even if they don’t contain cutting edge information: the National Science Teachers Association (http://www.nsta.org/), online periodic tables such as WebElements (http://www.webelements.com/) and Chemical Elements (http://www.chemicalelements.com/), the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (http://www.cdc.gov/), ACS (http://pubs.acs.org/) for lots of online journals, How Stuff Works (http://www.howstuffworks.com/), Microbes.info (http://www.microbes.info/), Space Weather (http://www.spaceweather.com/), the Molecular Expressions Microscopy Primer (http://micro.magnet.fsu.edu/primer/index.html), Light and Matter (http://www.lightandmatter.com/), Physics 2000 (http://www.colorado.edu/physics/2000/index.pl), and the always delightful Physics Classroom (http://www.physicsclassroom.com/). Ah…so much science, so little time!