Early in your career, research can feel like a relentless round of grant and fellowship applications, posters, talks, and reports, not to mention boundary-pushing experiments. You can sometimes feel like a production-line worker in a world-class assembly plant. One of the obvious pitfalls of this time is that you can become more and more focused on your research, and lose sight of the big picture. This diminishes your chances of enriching your research by cross-fertilisation from other fields. Even at the earliest stage in your career, you really need to make these cross-links. Why? Because they could provide the ammunition you need to convince the powers-that-be that you're on to the ‘next big thing’ – your passport to a fellowship or an academic post.

So, how can you expand the breadth of your knowledge en route to that independent job? There are many simple ways. As far as reading goes, time demands mean that post-docs can no longer fritter away half a day in the library scouring obscure journals as they used to in their graduate student days. Abstract scanning is part of the answer, even more so if you're not in a position to access the full contents of all the weird and wonderful journals themselves. A lot of this general fishing around can be made much easier with discipline-specific Web sites such as biology's Faculty of 1000 (faculty of 1000.com). Other scientists' home pages are also good primers for an unfamiliar area.