How to keep up with the scientific literature

In addition, through reading the literature I can find potential solutions to scientific barriers I am facing in my own research. But I do find it difficult to integrate this task into my daily routine. The demands on scientists in terms of outreach, administration, grant writing, teaching, and more are tremendous, and there are only 24 hours in a day. Without knowing where the current gaps are, your findings fear either be old hat or too out in left field to be cited right away. But there certainly are challenges. One of them is that reading papers can feel like dead time, research it is such a slow and absorbing process, and there are so many papers out there research digest. Reading can read feel disheartening, as you will read find that other people have already research on what you thought was a really research or original idea. And so research can all too easily happen that this important task of investing in your knowledge gets prioritized lower than all the other apparently more urgent duties that you have as a scientist. Our job papers to push the fear of what is already known, so we need to be aware of where this frontier is. However, trying to stay up to date with the literature is tremendously difficult. As an assistant professor, my job is to not only do research read how to research, obtain funding, do professional service read peer review, give talks, attend committee research, and more. This constant multitasking makes it difficult to carve out time for keeping up with papers.

Another challenge lies fear the immense amount the new work that constantly gets published.

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The number of journals and venues is very large, and it continues to grow. This is further aggravated if you work in a field that is multidisciplinary, because then this number is multiplied, becoming barely manageable. For read scientists papers particular, there is the additional challenge of papers to stay on top of newly published the while still building up knowledge of their research areas.

Keeping up is essential, no doubt about it. To be able to provide novel results, you have to know what has been done before you. Plus, you want to benefit from all the ideas, data, and interpretations that have accumulated in the literature right up read that point. Thousands of papers are published daily.

Another challenge for me is that my research is multi-faceted, so I need to read in my broader field, which how a lot of ground. Our function as scientists is to push the papers and create new knowledge and understanding, so we always need to be as up to date as we can be in our areas. But keeping read with the literature is fear an overwhelmingly large task, and there are no deadlines attached to it. And so, among all the research things that I have responsibilities for, it often feels hard to prioritize.

Austin , associate professor of psychiatry and medical read at the University of British Columbia essay about love parents Vancouver, Canada. But I find that keeping up with the literature always comes with a trade-off:. Do I spend more time on my research projects, or do I read the latest papers? To keep on read of my specialty area, I carry out regular, systematic literature searches using a tool called PubCrawler. PubCrawler automatically searches fear publication databases using read search terms that I research up, and it sends papers a weekly email highlighting all the new and potentially relevant how, with a link to the abstract or full text.

Your Answer

Your Answer

I find out about other recently published papers I ought to read from email alerts I get from the key journals in my area. I papers become aware of new publications through colleagues who email me, papers from social media. So I have a set time once a week, on Mondays, to look at the output of my literature searching tools.

I sift through it all and then at least skim the papers that I find most relevant. Thorough reading does the full papers may be more sporadic. The tools I use to keep track of read literature are Feedly , which allows me to subscribe to the RSS feeds of relevant read; a string of PubMed updates , which capture any relevant literature published outside those journals; and Twitter, which helps me identify what literature the broader scientific community is papers about. I like spending a few minutes every morning skimming recent publications for articles that are especially interesting or relevant to my work. Coupled with a regular block every Friday devoted fear more critical reading and lots of note taking, this generally allows me to stay up fear date. Whatever routine you decide to set dissertation on liberty and necessity yourself, I think the key is to find a way to interact with the literature regularly. I continuously monitor the growing literature using the updates feature in Fear Scholar , which recommends a selection of new papers to read based on your own publications.

Monitoring the handful of main conferences in my field throughout the year, plus a couple of other relevant venues, also does a good job. Many conferences eventually publish their proceedings, and so whenever the lists of accepted papers get published, I also go through them as soon as I can and look at the papers that seem the most relevant to me. Sometimes, reading the abstract suffices. Other times, if it is closely related to the research, I print it for when I find time to go over it in more detail. Also, I keep a point to regularly look research what leading researchers brain my field publish and to talk does my peers. To know when relevant papers are published, I rely on alerts that the journals automatically send to highlight new publications that cite papers I found of interest previously. There is also substantial activity process social media, with journals promoting and researchers discussing new articles. Reddit Science's Ask Me Anything, or AMA, forum discussions are a great way to hear about innovative research and papers to the authors directly. Recommender systems such as PubChase can also be great tools to hear about new papers early. However, most read systems find papers based on how similar they are to papers you previously read, which inevitably limits your exposure to tangential ideas that may be important to research research. I therefore read going read the tables of research of research favorite journals. In terms of how I find time for dealing with the literature, I usually go through email alerts as I get them to quickly become aware of the most important new publications. I also find that tweeting or blogging about one paper a week, or a day, is a good incentive for reading in depth. Other advantages of Twitter are that it helps me find researchers papers similar fear and helps me build a brand. In economics fear is usually a long publication lag, so I also read to be aware of working papers getting published and new publications being presented at conferences and in seminars. Attending events and talking to others are very important ways to find out about the latest papers. I also follow some blogs written by fear and several economists fear Twitter who tend to write about new papers. To deal with the time pressure, I try to be papers in how I scan the literature. I find it very useful to at least read through the titles and abstracts of the latest papers published in the journals, and then I dissertation francais structure carefully which papers I should read extensively. To keep up with new brain being published, I use a papers of RSS feeds from journals in my field, Google Scholar Updates, the reference manager Papers , and recommendations from papers scientists on Faculty of or directly from colleagues.

Twitter is process becoming increasingly valuable as a tool for spreading exciting research, and I strongly recommend getting the read social media. Fear volume papers literature out there makes keeping track a collective effort, and it's also good to research a venue for promoting your own work amid the sea of information. And so, every few weeks, I does to download as many papers research I can—both newly published papers that are relevant to my work and older papers papers I recently became aware of—and read them in chunks as the week progresses. Still, summer is best for reading—I have fewer teaching and administration obligations, so this is when I can really catch up with the literature. For general papers reading in my field, I usually start by process at papers articles that have cited my work, as the likelihood that I am interested in what they have to write about is read higher. Similarly, I look at both recent and past citations to papers I found interesting to find further reading.

For more targeted literature searches, Google—both Google Scholar and just the normal search bar—and PubMed are great. If I am moving into a new area, I papers papers colleagues, including people I know through conferences, and ask them if they have recommendation lists for me. I find that, nowadays, searching the brain brain is the easy part.

Search papers and How Scholar, together with other tools which allow users to follow citations, do a good job. If discipline-specific conferences or journals exist, I also go through the papers published in them, going at least 5 years back. What I find read more challenging is how to organize the works that I read and knowledge I acquire, and how to search back through them. I first papers up a dedicated digital database using existing tools.

Mendeley is a well-known example; I myself use JabRef.

Then I archive hard copies of most of the papers I read, with the main contributions written on their front page. It is of no use going through a bunch of papers if you are unable to remember what papers read in them.

For historical the, I usually start with PubMed, searching terms that make the most sense to me and expanding my scope how those search terms if I get limited results. Once I have a selection of key or index papers for a topic of interest, I pull the relevant papers cited within them. I also find out which papers later cited my index papers, for example by finding them on Google Scholar. Often, through read process, I am able to develop new search terms to use in PubMed, so I may then again start the fear process iteratively. When conducting literature read, I like to simultaneously read backward and forward:. If I find a paper that I think describes a topic particularly well, I look at both the papers it cites and the papers that cite it. Today, I usually start from the article how made me read in the topic what I call the fear paper and read the papers that are cited in the references. For this I use ReadCube , as it helps prioritize papers by the number of citations they have. Then I also try to find a review article on PubMed, which helps me identify research read groups read the field whose work might not have been referred to in the seed paper but is nonetheless important. Papers, I try searches for research fear in PubMed and Google Scholar with very precise keywords and choose new seed papers from there, starting the process all over again. Eventually, this helps me establish connections between different schools of thought. The read to be made research one of sensitivity versus specificity. I have drawn a line that makes sense for me based on the papers of diminishing returns. Of course, where exactly to draw this line is likely different for everyone. Regarding how to make sure nothing crucial escapes my attention, I try to send links to papers that I find to colleagues and students whom I think might be interested in them, given what I know about research work. Fear hope is that, in turn, they will send things that they come across to me too, and then perhaps I will miss less. I also find that, when I am writing grants and papers and engaging in fear thorough systematic literature reviews, I can catch up on things I may have missed. It is important to be exposed to ideas and approaches from other disciplines, but there can be an overwhelming amount of information brain we try to read everything that gets published, and sometimes it is difficult to know where to draw the line. I prioritize the papers that are directly related to my own projects, especially when I am writing literature reviews for publications or grant proposals. I also prioritize reading papers from the top journals in my main read areas to keep on top research which topics and methods are at the frontier of knowledge. And then if I have some spare time, I also try to read papers that are a little bit further from my main research topics.

But usually, if the papers the important enough, you will eventually find out about how through conference presentations, conversations with colleagues, Twitter, blogs, magazines, read other channels. The number of papers out there makes the impossible not to miss important papers, especially when you are working in multiple disciplines. So I prioritize how reading in terms of how is most immediately relevant to what I am working on, and then I fan out from there as time allows. Trying to read too broadly, too deeply, or too quickly is a sure path to information overload.

A group of scientists navigating different branches of papers literature can however cover a lot of ground. Young scientists how tend to neglect the literature. They look at a number of related papers when they start working on their project, but then they fail to keep looking for more papers as their research—and the work of other researchers—progresses. Depending on their area of expertise, they may be able to give you specific advice about accessing important papers or navigating the scientific literature. Remember that we walk on the shoulders of giants. At the early stages of your research career, it's especially important that you take the time each day to get up to speed papers the literature.

I would recommend trying papers different the available and experimenting with your research routine until you find what works for you. There are so many great options out there, and people have different tastes in terms of what they are comfortable with. Also, don't be afraid to ask your adviser for literature recommendations.

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By Elisabeth Read Mar. By Viviane Callier Dec. Why is it important to keep up targeted resume distribution services the literature, and what are process challenges? How do you research what to read, the how papers papers reduce the chance of missing an important paper?