Centre for Mathematical Biology's

CMB Group Meeting October 8th, 2012

Centre for Mathematical Biology's https://www.maths.ox.ac.uk/groups/mathematical-biology/internal/tips

Ornella Google Drive

5 free GB storage • easy access instant access to

• collaboration

• equations editor • forms, polls and surveys • translation • simultaneous work on docs • used Docs instead of email • version control • safe storage • tracking • work offline • allow editing without signing in

Ornella Organisation

• Date and number your pages or use a notebook • Write in meetings / write up meetings • Use referencing software • Bibtex • Mendeley / Refworks / Citeulike / Referencer • Keep track of the research skills things you've done • Keep a record of ideas you have about future directions • Backup your work! The university / maths institute has good back-up systems • Write up work as you go • Throw away work that is wrong

Louise Computing

• Scratch drive / networked scratch drives (/mi/share/scratch) • Subversioning (RabbitSVN is installed on the MI computers) • Dropbox (check the terms of use!) • Call your files sensible things • In Matlab: • Ask around if you're trying to do something - often people will know how! • Use sensible names for your variables • Comment your code • Mex functions • You can ssh into the MI computers (http://www.maths.ox.ac.uk/help/remote-access) • See http://www.maths.ox.ac.uk/help for useful computing info • LaTeX / Beamer

Louise Extras

• Conferences • Study Groups • Teaching / TAing • Bionumbers • SMB / ESMTB can give conference money if you join • Socials

Louise More on computing

• Learn how to code well • Thoroughly document your code • Be verbose in your coding • Create and keep useful functions in a sensible place • Try to keep your code such that you can rerun the analysis from scratch • Don’t be scared to delete code that didn’t work, but don’t delete code that did work but you haven’t used in a while • Learn how to profile your code and (if using Matlab) consider using MEX files for parts of code that are compute intensive

• Consider setting up a version control server • Dropbox is great if you are just managing folders of word files and presentations that only you work on • For any type of shared project consider using a proper line-by-line one that stores the entire history and allows conflict resolution (e.g. git or svn)

Alex Use a reference manager • There are lots to choose from: • Jabref (multiplatform) • Colwiz (multiplatform) • Papers (mac) • References (Linux) • Cite-u-like (online) • Zotero (online) • Mendeley (online) • Jabref • Import meta-data straight from Google scholar • Automatically link PDFs to the meta-data for quick access • Search for PDFs from within Jabref • Toggle journal abbreviations automatically • Give key words to references (like tags) • Search quickly through 1000s of references Kit Jabref – adding a citation

• Search in Google Scholar