Favorite web sites from nearly 50 science writers (see also the quick list for the following sites without the annotation):
Most web surfing science writers rely on being able to find the right page when they want it and proclaim loyalty to one or two general Internet search engines they can depend upon to take them there. "Why clutter your browser with hundreds of web pages when you can usually find what you want when you need it," says Bob Sanders, science writer at University of California, Berkeley. Here are some of your colleagues' favorites.
Alta Vista
http://altavista.digital.com/
Still at the top of the list as most preferred search engines for both the
Web and Usenet news groups. Valued for its huge returns. Many of them are
irrelevant, but Whitaker Foundation's Frank Blanchard says, "get used
to the search conventions, and you won't necessarily get overwhelmed with
responses." Nimble with obscure queries. "Here's the greatest
thing about Alta Vista. Type in a Latin species name, and find at least
one page--sometimes many--giving the common name, sometimes a photo, and
often a description--amazing," says Stephen Hart, senior writer and
editor for ABCnews.com in Seattle. Advanced search options offer wild-card
characters and "near" commands to refine searches.
Yahoo!
http://www.yahoo.com The top bookmark
on many lists for more selective returns on potentially infinite searches
of common terms. "My favorite Yahoo! search story is when I typed in
'what time is it' just to see what I would get and was directed to the Directorate
of Time at the US Naval Observatory, says Kathleen Carr.
Hotbot
http://www.hotbot.com/ A newer and
relatively unknown engine, but quickly becoming a favorite for speed and
precision. "I always seem to have better luck getting at exactly what
I'm looking for quicker with its search strategy," says Karen Young
Kreeger at UPenn.
Excite
http://www.excite.com Offers personalized
web page options to select daily news or regular search under certain keywords.
"Advanced search options offers concept searching, search refining,
finding similar pages, search truncations, and relevancy ranking,"
says Susan Gaidos, Purdue University. Joel Shurkin subscribes to an personalized
email web page, or "channel," configured for the news he wants
to read, including science.
Search-It-All
http://www.rockefeller.edu/search-it-all/
Offers links to many search engines with same query.
Web pages may be more dazzling and interactive than ever, but journalists need to track down sources on deadline to follow up on news releases and rumors, to conduct interviews and to solicit comments. Editors need to find fax numbers or email addresses for fact-checking. Public information officers want to track down their colleagues at other institutions and research organizations. Here are the recommended directories.
College and
University Home Pages
http://www.mit.edu:8001/people/cdemello/univ.html
A lot of sites provide university and college listings, but this Boston,
Mass., site was the runaway top choice. Offers alphabetical and geographic
(by country) links to home pages worldwide.
Four-11: the internet white pages
http://www.four11.com/ One of the first
comprehensive white page services and now merging with Yahoo!
Massachusetts Technology
Collaborative
http://www.mtpc.org/fedtek/fic/fbr-fpls.htm
Federal phone numbers; links to DOE, DOT, EPA, NIH, NSF, HHS and NASA directories
National
Institutes of Health phone book
gopher://gopher.nih.gov:70/77/gopherlib/indices/allphone/index
National Science
Foundation phone book
http://www.nsf.gov/pubs/1997/phnorg/phnorg.txt
Phonebook Gateway at
University of Illinois - Urbana-Champaign
http://www.uiuc.edu/cgi-bin/ph/lookup
Searchable by university or browse list of institutions.
Science Sources
http://www.eurekalert.org/cgi/scisrc/query
Used to be published as a book; offers keyword searches for public information
contacts at academic institutions, research organizations.
Switchboard
http://www2.switchboard.com/
Millions of residential and business listings across the country.
University Phone books
gopher://gopher.nd.edu:70/11/
Old technology, but fast. Click on "Non-Notre Dame Information Sources,"
then on "Phone Books--Other Institutions," then on "North
America" or whatever region of the world you want to search. Bookmark
that.
Wajens International White and Yellow
Pages
http://www.wajens.no/ - A collection
of on-line phone directories worldwide.
West's Legal Directory
http://www.wld.com/ A directory of lawyers.
Yahoo People Search
http://www.yahoo.com/search/people/
General addresses, phone numbers, email addresses.
A mix of subjects and types of sources.
Comets and Meteor
Showers
http://medicine.wustl.edu/~kronkg/index.html
Thankfully simple and has excellent links.
Encyclopedia Britannica
Online
http://www.eb.com:193/subscribe/index.htm
At $8.50 a month or $50 per year, a good deal for anyone who does a lot
of research and doesn't have a lot of shelf space, says John Keefe.
Internet Public Library
http://www.ipl.org/ref/ Quotations,
dictionaries, almanacs, links to resources on the 'net.
John Baez's Papers
www.math.ucr.edu/home/baez/README.html
News and analysis in mathematics and mathematical physics.
Local Times Around the World
http://www.hilink.com.au/times/
A handy way to find out if it's a reasonable time to call that scientist
overseas.
Medscape
http://www.medscape.com Good general
medical site, physician-oriented, full-text, medical news and drug searches.
MedsiteNavigator
http://www.MedsiteNavigator.com
Medical news, government health alerts, universities, corporations, web
sites and Medline. They review a different web site every week or so
Merck
Manual
http://www.merck.com/!!qpRmU0yhYqpRmU2PGT/pubs/mmanual/
Good summaries of etiologies, symptoms, and treatments for an enormous number
of conditions.
Nobel Foundation
http://www.nobel.se/ Good biographies
of past winners, proper spellings of names and prizes, up-to-date announcements
of new winners.
Origins of Expressions
http://www.cam.org/%7Ejennyb/origins.html#up
For crying out loud, come hell or high water, find out where those expressions
come from. University of Washington science writer David Brand uses this
page to inspire clever leads.
Patent databases
http://muscat.gdb.org/repos/pat/pat.html
http://www.sciencecoalition.org/library.htm
RxList - The Internet Drug Index
http://www.rxlist.com/ Helpful for
finding generic or trade names, references to structures, and pharmacological
data.
SciCentral
http://www.scicentral.co New metadirectory
of science and engineering resources created by scientists, for scientists.
Looks promising.
Science Gems
http://www-sci.lib.uci.edu/SEP/SEP.html
Wonderfully simple explanations for things that are hard to explain.
Faster than walking across the room and picking up the book.
Dictionary of
Cell Biology
http://www.mblab.gla.ac.uk/~julian/Dict.html
Free On-line Dictionary
of Computing
http://wagner.princeton.edu/foldoc/
Helps figure out whether "Mac OS" should be "MacOS"
or what the letters of "SIMM" stand for.
Webster's Dictionary
http://c.gp.cs.cmu.edu:5103/prog/webster
Insider information especially useful for savvy public information officers.
Community of Science
http://cos.gdb.org Searchable database
of self-reported research biographies from most major research institutions,
free to searchers from educational domains (.edu). Anyone can search federal
funding research database.
National Association of State
Universities and Land Grant Colleges
http://www.nasulgc.nche.edu/
Provides valuable links to federal and state agenices that keep track of
things, and to commission, committees, councils, programs.
University Research
Magazine Association
http://www.sas.it.mtu.edu/urel/urma/urma.html
Magazines on line, annual meetings, discussion of printing, paper, mailing,
audiences, surveys, costs.
NEWS AND ENTERTAINMENT ARCHIVES
No doubt about it, science writers are news junkies. What are the hot science stories? Who's writing about what? Who picked up my news release? Sites listed here are indexes, overviews and lists. Not included are favorite daily reads, such as the New York Times online or Wall Street Journal, which is worth the fee to several folks.
Drudge Report
http://www.drudgereport.com Lists
newswires, major newspapers, media gossip (true and false) and the occasional
scoop.
Editor & Publisher
http://www.mediainfo.com/
Elibrary
http://www.elibrary.com A $10/month
subscription fee buys you access to a database of articles from hundreds
of magazines and newspapers. One of the few things on the web worth paying
money for, according to some.
Internet Movie Database
http://us.imdb.com/ Doesn't relate to
science, you say? Well, wait until you get to " ... Fred Haise, the
astronaut portrayed by Bill Paxton in the 1995 film Apollo 13."
Newspaper Association of America
http://www.naa.org/hot/ Hotlinks to
newspapers on the web
NewsWorks
http://search.newsworks.com/
Keyword search for articles in 130 newspapers.
Television News Archive
http://tvnews.vanderbilt.edu/
A complete listing of stories from TV news programs dating back to 1986
(with abstracts).
University
of Virginia library link to newspapers
http://www.lib.virginia.edu/cataloging/vnp/paplist.html
Yahoo!'s New and Media
http://www.yahoo.com/News_and_Media/
Research publications, find writer's names and track down clips.
The good news is that most, if not all, major journals are available on the Internet by now. The bad new is that full text comes at a price. On the bright side, many are freely searchable and offer abstracts at least. Here are sites to find lots of your favorite esoteric literature.
BioMedNet
http://biomednet.com Lots of good journals
available in capsule form, with full-text if you pay extra. Home of free
online biology magazine "HMS Beagle."
EurekAlert!
Research Journals
http://www.eurekalert.org/links/Journals_public.html
Links to many prestigious journals; many searchable by abstracts. Full text
costs extra.
Medline
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/PubMed/medline.html
http://www4.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/PubMed/medline.html
(for advanced searches) A universal favorite -- and free -- source for medical
research. "Absolutely essential, fast and up-to-date," raves Richard
Robinson. "Excellent place to begin a background search or to start
digging up sources for biomed stories," says ScienceNOW editor Erik
Stokstad. Check out the rest of the site for an electronic catalog of historical
photos, posters and other graphics.
Los Alamos xxx e-print archive
http://xxx.lanl.gov/ Excellent archive
for physics and astronomy papers.
Stanford University's HighWire Press
http://www.highwire.edu Online publisher
of many prestigious journals, most of which start out with free web access
for a short time.
Stephen Hart's on-line journals
and magazines
http://nasw.org/users/hart/
Two research news sites stand out for ease of use. For many science writers, the best thing about them is that you don't have to visit the web site to get an idea of the news; both offer "push" services, sending headlines or abstracts by email. Most folks use both and report minimal redundancy.
Eurekalert!
http://www.eurekalert.org/ A regular
stop on many reporters' weekly web watches for timely news and advance notice
of embargo stories. Daily email service provides headlines for breaking
news and embargoed stories. Abstracts and full text available at web site.
Especially valued are links to journals, references, societies and institutions.
Newswise
http://www.newswise.com/ The other
favorite site for finding breaking science and medical news and remarkably
not too redundant. Regular email service provides not only headlines but
also abstracts on breaking news and embargoed stories. Get releases on the
web or avoid the web with email "fetch news" orders. Useful calendar
of science meetings.
If you cannot guess at the government address, you can find it here. Individual favorites available at the fuller web version of this page.
FedWorld
http://www.fedworld.gov/
Federal Web
Locator
http://www.law.vill.edu/fed-agency/fedwebloc.html
Quick access elimates need to save most agency addresses.
Library of Congress THOMAS system
http://thomas.loc.gov/ Congressional
bills histories, summaries and full text versions.
Index of Congressional
Research Service Reports
http://www.cnie.org/nle/crs_toc.shtml#a3
Reports emphasizing scientific basis in environmental decision making.
Looking for a good book or want some inspiration for tonight's dinner?
Amazon.com bookstore
http://www.amazon.com Huge selection,
discounted prices, quick delivery. "The only down side for Penn State's
A'ndrea Elyse Messer is that "I can't hold the books in my hand and
flip through them." .
Bibliofind
http://www.bibliofind.com Search
part of the inventory of 1,500 used book stories; great for finding out-of-print
books, says Shauna Roberts.
SOAR: Searchable
Online Archive of Recipes
http://godzilla.eecs.berkeley.edu/recipes/
One of the end-of-the-day sites for gourmet chef Bob Sanders.
Gourmet Guide
http://www.2way.com/food/egg/index.html
European Union of Science Journalists'
Associations
http://www.esf.org/eusja/
National Association of Science Writers
http://www.nasw.org
Northern California Science Writers
Association
http://www.lbl.gov/NCSWA/ Address
is case sensitive. Good pages for internet searching, online news outlets
and science resources.
Society of Environmental Journalists
http://www.sej.org Up-to-date links by
list and searchable. Excellent environmental resource. Get to know it.
Back to Table of Contents: A Few Favorite Science Writing Websites