[Question] Online resources for research?

Try google with "research collaboration tools" - there are many, but having not used any I can't personally speak to the topic. But perhaps having some magic words will help you research your options...

Here are the sites I use a lot for work:

For publications (academic)

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/journals

Proteomics sites for things like structure and sequences (Protein Data Bank and Expasy are huge databases compiled from published information seen in journal banks like Pubmed)

I use protein prospector as a tool for work I do involving mass spectrometry. I use the molecular biologists toolkit for compiling and comparing sequences - pretty useful for molecular cloning.

http://www.rcsb.org/pdb/home/home.do
http://expasy.org/proteomics
http://prospector.ucsf.edu/prospector/mshome.htm
http://mbt.sdsc.edu/

Pharmaceutical Industry methods, reagent info, and cGMP guidelines.

http://www.usp.org/
Added at: 11:58

Sites that are useful for networking between teams that are researching or want to research something similar, sites to have and explore curricula, to find published articles, to have a fully customizable calendar for conferences and conventions, to recieve info about these conventions, calls for papers...

Click to expand...

As far as conference and conventions, usually you kind of grandfather yourself into knowing which conferences and conventions are important relative to your field of research. You usually get sent flyers and mailers via email as you get more and more involved and networked through your publications. You kinda know which ones to go to; sometimes colleagues make you aware of newer ones.

A lot of academic fields are fairly small groups. Researchers get to know each other through networking in graduate school through their mentors and through meeting at conferences. Generally, if you have questions about a paper you read (published) the email for the P.I. (primary investigator) involved in the work is readily available on the first page. Most collaborations are done this way, where researchers see similarities in each others work and request materials or information via email correspondence.

I know that sites like Linkedin forums are becoming popular hubs for scientists to get together. I get a lot of helpful info on pharmaceutical chromatography software through Linkedin. While it's useful, I do get really annoyed at the amount of douchebags who just graduate from college, and try to "friend" me on Linkedin so I can offer them a job. That's not how you want to network.

Hope this helps.