• Question: How do you stay updated on new developments in your field?

    Asked by keys532kaon83 to scottgriffiths, Holly Hill, Georgia R, Georgia, Daniel C, audreyanna, Andrew M, Alana M, Adam C on 6 Nov 2025.
    • Photo: Daniel Chernick

      Daniel Chernick answered on 6 Nov 2025:

      There’s a fun way and a less fun way. The fun way is being able to travel to different places in the UK and the world to conferences and events, where people are sharing their own new developments, and you can talk to a lot of people who may know different things to you. The less fun way (when you don’t have the money or time to travel) is to read magazines, journal papers and attend online seminars (webinars) about things that you’re interested in.

    • Photo: Holly-Anne Hill

      Holly-Anne Hill answered on 6 Nov 2025:

      Science doesn’t stand still, so I make sure I don’t either. I attend conferences and events all over the UK, where I can talk to research and development scientists who are there sharing their new ideas and developments. I attend as many training sessions and webinars as I can and try to keep up to date with journal articles. I also follow scientists on social media, it is an easy way to interact and they are always happy to answer questions and discuss their research. Curiosity is one of a scientist’s best tools.

    • Photo: Georgia Rowe

      Georgia Rowe answered on 6 Nov 2025:

      I agree with the other answers. I usually do a lot of research online of academic papers. You can get automatic collections of papers in topics you are interested in by using something like FeedReader.

      Attending conferences is definitely the best way of finding and absorbing new information though! Although these can be expensive for a university/company to pay for, so I usually only attend 1 or 2 a year.

    • Photo: Andrew McDowall

      Andrew McDowall answered on 6 Nov 2025:

      Largely with the help of my company’s information service. One of the sorrows of leaving university was the loss of access to a good library (and all those journal subscriptions). The information service keeps an eye on what’s happening in the academic literature and, importantly, also on what our competitors are patenting. Patents give a company protection to exploit a new product or invention for a set period before others can copy it, but to be valid need to published by the patent authority with a wealth information supporting the claims that the invention is new and novel. We analyse their patents to work out what directions and strategies they’re pursuing, and to work out if we can challenge or work around the patent. And if that fails we just buy their products on the open market and analyse them instead, as they do ours.

    • Photo: Alana McNulty

      Alana McNulty answered on 7 Nov 2025:

      There are lots of ways to keep up to date with new advancements, though this can be trickier once you’re not at university. From an industrial point of view, we attend conferences to keep up to date (I’ve attended one on reactor graphite management in the last year), have discussions with colleagues and other industry personnel about the latest approaches/ techniques etc (this is really key to help make informed decisions about the best ways of doing things) and try and keep up to date myself through reading industry magazines / journals.

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