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Read before you request
In the past five years of my study in Canada, I have received numerous emails from fellow students back home requesting for journal articles and other academic resources. When I get such requests, I try to act promptly with enthusiasm. Our students are brilliant and catches things very quickly. They can analyze things very critically. However, their condition is like a powerful machine without any fuel. I (and perhaps others living abroad) take my pleasure to provide them with a little bit of support whenever they need.
To me, supporting an underprivileged group is always encouraging. But at times I get perplexed, especially, when you receive a request like the following:
Sir, how are you? I need the following (book or papers.... Thanks, bye.
I stop for a while as to whether I should respond to such queries at all. Sometime they request for a whole bunch of papers, many of which are available free of cost via Google Scholar. I guess some students do not even read the list; they just copy from the back of a paper and pastes them on a document and sends in. That's it!
So, in order to be able to help students better I am outlining some basic steps that one should follow before requesting for articles/books from me.
If you are looking for journal articles
- please search it first in Google / Google Books / Google Scholar / A9.com for availability of a possible free copy.
- if you are requesting for articles from several journals, please make the list according to journals and in a chronological order. That i.e, put the oldest first, then the newer... or the other way.
- do not copy-paste from the back of a paper. Even if you do so, please correct for any typographical errors inherent in them.
- try to show your seriousness, i.e., write a few lines about what steps have you taken to obtain a particular reference.
- do not blindly ask for a research topic. This is for you to take up with your supervisor.
- do not send the list in attachments. Please sent plain-text email only.
If you are looking for books
Please note that books are the most expensive academic material in any developed country (US, Canada, UK, Australia and so on). Unlike our parts of the world (Bangladesh, India, etc) llibraries in developed countries do not carry textbooks. Textbooks are those books which are necessary for a course. For example, any third-year level Mmathematical Statistics course would have Introduction to Mathematical Statistics by Hogg, McKean and Craig listed as a textbook. Textbooks are for the students to purchase and they are really expensive (e.g., the above mentioned book is priced between $100 to $150 in the US and Canada.
Some books are available online or from other sources which you should try to find from the Internet. Google is the best tool to search for these books. Some forums also have links to such books. Also some file sharing sites (such as www.esnips.com) where PDF versions of some books could be found.
Buy books from local bookstore
Purchasing books in India or Bangladesh is a lot cheaper than here. Some of the classic books have low priced edition for the students in the Indian subcontinent. It is usually a good idea to contact your local book seller and request them to get a copy of the low priced edition for you.
This talk will be updated as often as it is necessary. Thanks for your understanding. Comments and suggestions are welcome.
Facebook!
Now a days students email me through Facebook! Not surprising, but I don't like it. I do not have time to spend time on Facebook. So when someone contacts me via Facebook, I get a notification. Many times I don't feel interested at all to login to Facebook just to read that email. So, if you want quick reply, please email me directly.
Last updated: Jan 21, 2010
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Comments
Re: Read before you request
Well, about the above, my comments are as follows:
Courtesy Issue
I consider myself lucky if they add the lines "how are you?" and/or "Thank you!" - because most of the time I get the e-mails like a special delivary orders "I need the following journal papers which is necessary to do my research with Dr . XXXX sir: and he asked to send them as quickly as possible", while the Subject line contains "Urgent" or "Very Important", or if I am lucky, I get "Help junior brother in ISRT".
Acknowledgement Issue
When I send somebody something, I really appreciate to know if what I sent is viewable or in some particular instances, whether that one is the right one. If none is the case, a simple "Thanks" would suffice the whole ordering business (as far as I remember, I used to do that).
Spelling Issue
When writing the names of articles, if the names are wrong, the way I search, it takes way too much time to find the correct one, considering the fact that the correct names pop up in one click in my Library cateloging system! While copy - pasting the whole biblography, or some times typing, its understandable if there is some mistakes. But its not at all appreciable if the person requesting the paper does not even take time to correct it (possibly the reason is that they are so busy that they are all in such a rush, and we are spending our futile moments and leisure times, what better things are we doing rather than correcting some silly mistakes like these?)
Learn how to search
Most people are not aware how to use google. They just try-in some key words and go through all the hits (at least first few pages before they give up), which is not the way to search at all. For example, if you are trying to find something related to R tutorials of CoxPH model residuals, if u try in "residual", there are 29,700,000 hits, for "cox proportional residual R coxph filetype:pdf" it gets more narrow down to 23,100 hits and so on. Please look in Google search options and tips for more detailed options to learn how to search efficiently.
The Burning Question
To be honest "been there, done that". Therefore, I really don't mind sending the requested journal papers (in some instances, I did way more than that), but the fact is, is it really worth? Does anybody really reads what we are sending? I usually get same people asking for several papers, all from different topics each time. What does that really mean? How much research are they doing? If the abstruct is all that is needed, I believe, most of the abstructs can be found free if someone can search properly. But then again, I am just the delivary boy, I don't get to ask!
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