list of links

The advice in this thread is just the usual guff, but the comment about the Transylvanian Journal of Vampire Philosophy is absolutely hysterical.

As a beginning graduate student in the social sciences, what sort of software should you use to
do your work? More importantly, what principles should guide your choices? This article offers
some answers. The short version is: write using a good text editor (there are several to choose
from); analyze quantitative data with R or Stata; minimize errors by storing your work in a simple
format (plain text is best) and documenting it properly. Keep your projects in a version control
system. Back everything up regularly and automatically. Don’t get bogged down by gadgets, utilities or other accoutrements: they are there to help you do your work, but often waste your time
by tempting you to tweak, update and generally futz with them. To help you get started, I provide
a short discussion of the Emacs Starter Kit for the Social Sciences, a drop-in set of useful defaults
designed to help you get started using Emacs (a powerful, free text-editor) for data analysis and
writing.

i.e.

Troves of Personal Data, Forbidden to Researchers
By JOHN MARKOFF
Published: May 21, 2012

Opinion: Academia Suppresses Creativity | The Scientist via @sharethis

"Today I resigned from the editorial board of a well respected journal in my field – Genomics.  No longer can I work for a system that provides solid profits for the publisher while effectively denying colleagues in developing countries access to research findings."

The Problem

Authors increasingly cite webpages and other digital objects on the Internet, which can "disappear" overnight. In one study published in the journal Science, 13% of Internet references in scholarly articles were inactive after only 27 months. Another problem is that cited webpages may change, so that readers see something different than what the citing author saw. The problem of unstable webcitations and the lack of routine digital preservation of cited digital objects has been referred to as an issue "calling for an immediate response" by publishers and authors [1].

An increasing number of editors and publishers ask that authors, when they cite a webpage, make a local copy of the cited webpage/webmaterial, and archive the cited URL in a system like WebCite®, to enable readers permanent access to the cited material.
What is WebCite®?

WebCite®, which used to be a member of member of the International Internet Preservation Consortium, is an on-demand archiving system for webreferences (cited webpages and websites, or other kinds of Internet-accessible digital objects), which can be used by authors, editors, and publishers of scholarly papers and books, to ensure that cited webmaterial will remain available to readers in the future. If cited webreferences in journal articles, books etc. are not archived, future readers may encounter a "404 File Not Found" error when clicking on a cited URL. Try it! Archive a URL here. It's free and takes only 30 seconds.

A WebCite®-enhanced reference is a reference which contains - in addition to the original live URL (which can and probably will disappear in the future, or its content may change) - a link to an archived copy of the material, exactly as the citing author saw it when he accessed the cited material.