Starting a reading list for Gobbledygook

Starting a reading list for Gobbledygook
Flickr photo by margolove.

All science bloggers do a lot of reading for background information, or write blog posts based on a (newly published) paper, blog post or news item. So I thought that it would be a good idea to collect those references in a single place.

Reading lists are perfect for this, and they are easy to create and maintain with web-based reference managers. Reading lists are used in teaching, e.g. to provide a list of required reading material for a class. But I can also see a number of benefits for science blogs:

  • they help the blogger to organize his background material for writing
  • they help the reader find and keep referenced material
  • they can provide additional reading not mentioned in the blog post

There are several good tools for reading lists. I decided to use CiteULike, because what I really want here is a social bookmarking tool that understands references. My Goobledygook reading list is here, the RSS feed is here, and the most recent items in the reading list are also shown in a new sidebar to the right. I started with references to papers, but plan to also include blog posts and other web resources.

Copyright © 2010 Martin Fenner. Distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.