How do I find research groups that do work in field X?

Question

What is the best way to go about to find a certain research group that do work in a specific field (e.g research groups doing empirical brain investigations but working from a dualistic perspective, or research groups doing eyetracker work on infants)?

Answer 1

Well, I find reasonable numbers for research groups focusing on eyetracking by using Google and search operators. Of course, you should add some redundant similar terms (eye-movement, baby,...)

Notice, there are some patterns:

• american universities nearly always have edu (actually it's even a domain) in their URL, german univ. uni. So using inurl:edu in google filters out a lot. Non-university institutes like german Max-Planck often have URL patterns too.

• further add -filetype:pdf -filetype:doc -filetype:ppt -filetype:ps to filter out more useless results

• add 2010..2012 to be sure the site/group is still active and the topic on their agenda.

• add research | forschung (latter being german translation, but afaik nowadays most natural sciences groups in Germany have a english (& german) page)

Some research branches also have a online directory, there exist also internet directories like dmoz (not sure if this stuff is up to date, probably some dead links):

http://www.eurosys.org/directory/

http://www.dmoz.org/Science/Biology/Neurobiology/Research_Groups_and_Centers/

http://www.ida.liu.se/ext/etai/actions/colloq/groups.html

At least I can say that most research groups in Germany will have a english home page and short summary/research topics/open positions on it. So there should be no general problem to find them by some "serious" googling. But don't use too specific keywords, "eyetracking on infants", "dualistic view" is too special imho, use keywords being specific rather to the topic than the exact methodology. They are probably mainly interested in how the visual recognition system adapts and learns over time, this is the bigger thematic picture. You attract master and phd students not by naming a special experimental method, so you will not find these type of keywords often on a group page, where they often try to put in a minimum of time.

Answer 2

I would try the following, in order of "how useful the results will be":

1. If you know someone - anyone - in the field, have them recommend names of labs/professors to you. The names they give you will likely be people relevant to their research who have done solid research, and have really established their names in the field. This is the best approach.

2. If you have access to journal articles, find a good journal in field X and look for a recent paper. There are two ways to do this one:

   1. Look in a couple of articles that seem interesting and see which authors are cited most often in the "introduction" section. Chances are, those authors have completed some recent seminal work, which all these other papers are using as their research springboard.
   2. Look for a review paper, and see who is cited often. This isn't such a good method, as I've found that many review articles will be fairly biased towards themselves/their collaborators, but it still can be useful.

3. Go to any big-name university's department web page for field X and browse the faculty listings. This is a total crapshoot; you'll find lots of labs, but there's no surefire way to tell quality of lab from their department web page.

Answer 3

Frequently formalized groups of academics hold conferences, or if it is a more specialized field they are frequently part of a broader conference but have special panels/proceedings/meetings within the larger conference.

So possibilities of finding such groups are;

• Looking at the CV of authors in the field to see if they are members of such organizations or have presentations at said conferences.
• Looking for conferences in the broader field, and seeing if they host research on specific topics.

Other possibilities include email list-serves and forums. I'm not sure if I have any better advice to find such groups than besides doing regular internet searches though.

Answer 4

If you know specific search terms you're looking for, you could begin by searching Web of Science for the specific combinations you're looking for, and then following up on the specific groups that are returned by such a search.

You may need to use some creativity in narrowing down the search criteria to avoid getting 5000 hits that you need to sift through, but there are a large number of possible "narrowing" options on Web of Science (year of publication, location, sorting by citations, etc.) that can help you.

Alternatively, sites like academia.edu or even a more generic engine like Scholar Google may be able to assist you in this process.

Answer 5

I found one possibly relevant result searching Mendeley for your topic of interest. The advantage of using Mendeley over Google is that you can limit your search to researcher profiles. On-site people search is a little broken sometimes, so you might have better luck actually doing a Google search but limiting it to Mendeley profiles like this: https://encrypted.google.com/search?q=eyetracking+site%3Amendeley.com%2Fprofiles%2F

Answer 6

One way is to ask ChatGPT. Although its answers are sometimes inaccurate, it can help a lot when your question is a bit vague. It understands what research groups are and it understands the connections between fields.

With ChatGPT you don't need to list all the different synonyms for your field or their subfields and it can choose to ignore some parts of your query if they're too specific.

For my own search I've seen that out of the 10 suggestions it gave me, 2 were misnamed or didn't exist, but the rest all seemed to be very good suggestions.

Of course this is just a tool and you should never rely on it too heavily, but it can help you find research groups which are a good fit for what you're looking for. Also note that ChatGPT was trained on data from 2020, so it might be outdated.

Here's an example output of ChatGPT for your query:

Can you list several research groups doing empirical brain investigations but working from a dualistic perspective, or research groups doing eye-tracker work on infants.

I can certainly provide you with some examples of research groups that fit your criteria:

• The Center for Mind, Brain, and Culture at Emory University: This interdisciplinary research center includes researchers who work from a dualistic perspective to investigate the relationship between the mind and brain. They use a variety of empirical methods, including neuroimaging and behavioral experiments.

• The Human Neuroscience Laboratory at the University of Utah: This lab conducts research on the neural mechanisms underlying human perception and cognition. They use both behavioral and neuroimaging techniques, including fMRI and EEG, to investigate these mechanisms from a dualistic perspective.

• The Center for Cognitive Science at the University of Minnesota: This interdisciplinary center includes researchers from psychology, philosophy, linguistics, and neuroscience. Some of their work investigates the mind-body problem from a dualistic perspective, using neuroimaging and behavioral experiments.

• The Infant Cognition Center at the University of British Columbia: This research group investigates the cognitive and perceptual abilities of infants using a variety of methods, including eye-tracking. They have published several studies on infant perception of social cues and facial expressions.

• The Developmental Neuroscience Lab at the University of California, Berkeley: This lab uses a variety of methods, including eye-tracking, to investigate the neural and cognitive mechanisms underlying developmental processes in infants and young children.

I hope this helps! Please note that this is not an exhaustive list, and there are many other research groups out there conducting similar work.