Oldies and Goodies

Posted on May 23, 2008 by | 7 Comments

You have only a week left to submit your entries for the Blog about a classic science paper challenge. The links to early bird posts are already being collected and I hope there will be more soon. If you intend to write about a paper in the field of psychology, SciCurious discovered an awesome website where you can find all the classic articles in the history of psychology. Just yesterday, I saw the website where there will be such a repository of historical papers (and other materials: photos, anecdotes, etc.) in the Chronobiology field. This will be built over the next few months. I’ll try to do my post over the weekend if I can.

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7 responses to “Oldies and Goodies”

  2. Coturnix's avatar Coturnix | May 23, 2008 at 11:16 am |

    Thank you – that is a great resource as well. I wonder if other fields have such repositories.
    One thing that always bothers me is that in all the talking about Open Access, the focus is entirely on new papers. I want to see all the papers from the past freely available as well and this appears to be up to individual scientific societies.
    I would also like to see this blogging initiative become regular – perhaps a monthly or even quarterly carnival.

  3. Barn Owl's avatar Barn Owl | May 23, 2008 at 11:33 am |

    I would also like to see this blogging initiative become regular – perhaps a monthly or even quarterly carnival.
    Skulls in the Stars had a great idea initiating this and requesting contributions, and SciCurious started the links rolling with a pingback. A carnival of classic science papers would be excellent-I’d be happy to take a turn hosting it at my blog.

  4. scicurious's avatar scicurious | May 23, 2008 at 4:32 pm |

    I concur, I’d be really happy to do monthly or quarterly classic science papers, it’s really interesting stuff!

  5. Barn Owl's avatar Barn Owl | May 23, 2008 at 11:18 pm |

    Here are the URLs for two websites with links to classic papers:
    Neuroscience (Society for Neuroscience)-
    http://www.sfn.org/index.cfm?pagename=HistoryofNeuroscience_classicpapers
    Genetics –
    http://www.esp.org/foundations/genetics/classical/browse/

  6. Daniel Rothman's avatar Daniel Rothman | May 29, 2008 at 5:39 pm |

    As an aside, this reminds me of a term project from a CS advanced undergrad course I took – prof had about 5 ‘old’ and ‘classic’ papers (old and classic being relative in CS), and allowed each student to choose one to provide a ‘modern’ implementation of the material discussed.
    I now know more about graph embedding algorithms and pseudo-algol than I ever wanted to… (well – the algo itself was very cool – algol is not my friend though).
    I’d have to think harder about how/whether this could be applied in other disciplines, but for CS (and probably for EE, Chem, ChemE) it’s a great way to teach the material and develop some appreciation for the history and roots of the field.

  7. Coturnix's avatar Coturnix | May 29, 2008 at 6:05 pm |

    I taught a graduate seminar once in Behavioral Biology in which I paired a classic paper with a related recent one. That was fun!