Day 12: how to filter the literature

so I've been talking about the academic literature and having the groundbreaking papers as kind of a starting point and then going into the less influential stuff and in the last video I mentioned how different papers will be useful to you at different times and how you have to quite quickly do an assessment of where your attention needs to be so there needs to be some kind of process of filtering so I'm going to share with you what I do or what I did during my PhD now a lot of people try to organize the literature thinking about software or having a matrix of notes you can actually do things much much much simpler and all you need is a pen basically so when you look at the literature try to do a quick assessment of its quality and relevance and then you can rate it on a scale from A to D so a being the top rated D being the lowest rated so the a rated papers they'll be relatively few of these and these will be the ones which have either had a big impact on the field so they're really important really influential or they are really important and relevant to your research okay so there'll be some which are generally very important so much are specifically very important just for you okay these they'll be relatively few of so throughout your PhD you might find 10 to 20 of these over the course of several several years so these are the ones where if you took these out your work would be completely different well the field would be completely different so they're they're quite rare these are the ones you'll probably read several times throughout your PhD so you need to really spend time with them understand them and come back some time and time again then you'll have to be rated papers and these are perhaps less important but still interesting and relevant and maybe they have a slight influence on the way you think or the way you go about your research there will be more of these so there'll be high quality relevant to what you do they will make you think at least a little bit but they're perhaps not absolutely essential top rating stuff so they'll be slightly more of these then you have the C rated papers so this will be the the bulk of the kind of good work in your field where it's perfectly good interesting work but it's not really that important so it doesn't have a big impact on you you know it's just okay you know quite interesting just okay it might be extremely relevant and useful to somebody else but not to you then you have the deer exit papers there'll be thousands of these and these will either be low-quality or just not at all relevant so don't fall into the trap of thinking just because something's published in a peer-reviewed journal that isn't good or that you have to cite it know the bulk of them will be either you know irrelevant or low-quality don't it spend any time on these so when you look at a stack of papers or a load of search results what you want to do is try and quickly filter the papers into these four categories so the ones which are D rated you just move on quickly the ones which are a rated you take your pen you print out the you print out the paper first you take a pen and you draw a big star on the front or a big a with a load of start so you can find it easily again the B rated ones you print them out you save them and then you know you can refer to those as and when you need the C rated ones you can you know keep those in a in a folder for for a rainy day right so you might come back to them now a lot of people worry about getting this categorization right but the thing is that as I said last time it's an iterative process so you can read a paper once categorize it filter it into one of these categories but then maybe in six time or two years time you realize actually you know that's not that important or you come back to one of the C rated papers and saying oh actually this is really useful but maybe you just weren't ready for it at the time when you initially looked at it so really it's a system for just deciding where your attention needs to be and then you can spend more time with the ones which are more important and more relevant so what you can then do is build up this foundation of knowledge and basically the way you know if you have that is if you're able to have a conversation with another academic in your field about what is happening in the literature so you carry that base of understanding with you it's not locked away in software or locked away in notes it's in your head but you might not remember all of the details you might not remember exactly who published this thing or exactly who said that but if you have this overall picture or this underlying understanding what you can then do is go back to the literature and find the relevant stuff as and when you need it and that's what you know real academics do you know they don't remember if we paper but they know where to look when something's relevant when something comes up so that is what you want as your as your foundation and it all comes from this quick initial filtering which you can do with pen and paper and it doesn't require any software and it's really really easy

Channel: James Hayton PhD

Views: 3,180

Rating: 5 out of 5

Keywords: PhD, literature review

Id: CR09yiOXan0

Length: 5min 48sec (348 seconds)

Published: Sat Jul 21 2018