Best ways to keep you updated with eye and vision research

If you want to be a researcher in future, it is very important that you stay updated with the current research going on in your areas of interest, organisations that offer good research positions and attending and participating continuous medical educations(conferences, seminars and workshops). I know, getting motivated to open journals, websites or magazines to read random things and search your area of interest is very difficult. I have a few simple tips that will make you excited to explore research.

Eye research
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Visionlist:

It is a vision science mailing list. Once you subscribe to this list, you will get e-mails regarding jobs, PhD’s, Postdocs, training opportunities, conferences etc. The best part about this subscription is that is moderated by a human, completely eliminating spam mails. This also includes discussions related to project proposals, methodologies and Softwares related to Vision science. You can always be a part of it and learn from them. To subscribe click here.

Review of Optometry:

In collaboration with this journal, there a bunch of new letters including Ophthalmic reviews from professionals, ophthalmic practice pearls, Dispensing updates, Myopia Management, Women in Optometry, COVID 19 Ophthalmic news and many more. To check out this list click here.

Cybersight:

If you subscribe to this website, you will only get e-mails about the live webinars. That is why you should definitely check out this webpage for other features like free certification online courses and books (which you can actually download). It is for both Optometrists and Ophthalmologists. To subscribe click here.

Optometry DistList:

India Vision Institute is an independent, not-for-profit registered trust. To advance Indian Optometry, they work for awareness generation, capacity building, leadership development and promoting the research culture. Their newsletter has information related to webinars, conferences, entrance exams or admission to different organisations and recent research updates. To subscribe click here.

Vision aid:

It is a registered non-profit corporation. It mainly works to empower visually impaired individuals and conducts webinars on a regular basis on best practices for eye care. To register click here.

Google Scholar:

I think you must have used it many times to do a literature review.  It is a freely accessible web search engine that contains scholarly literature. It includes books, conference abstracts, theses, dissertations, preprints, technical reports and patents. Any individual who has access to this search engine can easily create an account and update their profile. So, If you are a person interested in knowing about what your professors or friends publish, just follow these steps.  Open google scholar, type the name of the researcher you are interested, click on their profile and follow them. You get email alerts every time they publish or get citations. In the same way, you can get alerts for your favourite topics as well.

Profellow:

The founder, Vicki Johnson applied to and earned several fellowships throughout her career. She realised that some of the best fellowship opportunities were buried on obscure websites. Vicki and Ryan Johnson founded ProFellow in 2011 to serve as the go-to source of information on professional and academic fellowships.  This is an excellent resource to find fully-funded PhD opportunities, research fellowships and graduate degree opportunities. This also contains the information from the Universities which generally do not advertise about their fellowships online. It has several articles on tips to revamp your statement of purposes, CVs and cover letters. To subscribe click here.

Researcher: 

This is one of the easiest ways to get updates in research. Researcher is an android application which has scientific literature from around 16,000 journals over a wide range of subject areas. Just download this application. Create your own personalised feed by following the journals of your interest and get all the notifications from those journals whenever they publish. You can also find out the trending articles, similar to the way you get trending videos on youtube. It has an option to bookmark the articles to read for later. This will even direct you to the full-text article if the journal has open access. This application supports both Mendeley and Zotero. You can sign in and scroll it on the laptop also. To install click here.

LinkedIn:

This is one of the best applications for connecting people professionally. Look at people’s profiles. Choose only them, who can actively keep you updated with useful information on the feed.

ResearchGate:

ResearchGate is similar to Researcher but it will have research content along with fruitful discussions between the researchers. Signing up for this website will also be helpful in downloading a few exclusive articles as well.

Industries:

If you are a person interested in joining industries, you can try subscribing  Zeiss and Essilor

The first five of the above, are especially for eye care professionals, and the remaining can be used by anyone interested in research. Now, I am sure that you undoubtedly will have a great feed in your e-mails, distracting you from other social media.