A few remarks about searching:<\/p>\n
(1) Like many (probably most) researchers, I use search tools on the internet multiple times daily to locate relevant information to what I do; these searches, however, are only as good as the search terms I use, and every once in a while, it is really hard to guess the right ones! The last instance of this is that it is only last week that J. Achter<\/a> pointed out to me (and my coauthors) an interesting paper of D. Masser<\/a> from 1996 which is very closely related to my paper on simple jacobians in families<\/a> and the larger sieve<\/a> (with J. Ellenberg, C. Hall, and C. Elsholtz; see also Quomodocumque’s post<\/a> on this).<\/p>\n (2) Apart from Google, of course, the most useful tool for a mathematician is the Mathematical Reviews<\/a> (and Zentralblatt<\/a>, though I have to admit that I rarely look at the latter). I can still remember when this only existed in paper, and I would sometimes browse the Number Theory section when the new monthly issue came in; and I remember even more vividly the first electronic version (around 1993–94), on six (!) CDROMS, which required a multi-platter CD-ROM reader\/changer to be accessed. There was one workstation with it in the library of the Institut Fourier<\/a>, and the search times were atrocious because of the delays in changing one disc for another… Now my question is: does there exist a similar database in other fields? Specifically, I’ve been searching high and low for prior references to hand signals in geckos<\/a> (the power of blogging: this is the third hit when searching google for “gecko”…), and I’ve found that being deprived of the analogue of Math Reviews makes me feel quite helpless. I haven’t found any explicit reference on Google Scholar, and I don’t know if there is somewhere a better source of information on such a topic.<\/p>\n (I did search for “Gecko” in Math Reviews: no luck… however, if you’ve discovered a nice mathematical object which seems very sticky and acrobatic, you know a good name for it now…)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" A few remarks about searching: (1) Like many (probably most) researchers, I use search tools on the internet multiple times daily to locate relevant information to what I do; these searches, however, are only as good as the search terms I use, and every once in a while, it is really hard to guess the … Continue reading Searching…<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":625,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-656","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blogroll"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ethz.ch\/kowalski\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/656","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ethz.ch\/kowalski\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ethz.ch\/kowalski\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ethz.ch\/kowalski\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/625"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ethz.ch\/kowalski\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=656"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ethz.ch\/kowalski\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/656\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ethz.ch\/kowalski\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=656"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ethz.ch\/kowalski\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=656"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ethz.ch\/kowalski\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=656"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}