How To Read Papers Fast & Effectively - PhD student

hi i'm schloss fraser a second year computational neuroscience phd student and today i want to talk to you about reading papers fast so do you also always struggle with reading the literature adding papers left and right to your to be read list feeling extremely overwhelmed in the weekends because you assumed you would be reading all these papers in the weekends and end up not reading anything well i got you today i want to talk about how i read papers relatively fast and how i can get through all the work that is being published in neuroscience without feeling super overwhelmed because i think after two years of doing my phd i finally found some methods and some tips and tricks that really helped me reading the papers that i have to read so i will take you through them right now so i think with reading papers there are usually three things that we want so first we want to read a lot of papers such that we can keep up with all the literature second we want to remember what we have read because otherwise all this reading doesn't really have any use and firt we want to put all the papers and everything we remember into the bigger context of our scientific body or our scientific literature world so first of all i want to talk about how to read a lot faster such that you can read everything or everything you kind of want to so i think most people that i know read in this manner so it's a technique to skim the paper so i'll put up my second screen and kind of take you through how i would approach a new paper so the first thing i would do is to look at the title and the abstract and to decide quite fast if it's actually worth reading the paper or if it's worth my time because a lot of papers even though they seem relevant perhaps are not that relevant so it's your job to kind of decide quite quickly if it's worth your time and effort so i skim the title and abstract and see kind of what results are being presented in the paper and then once i've decided to read the paper or i think it's worth my time i immediately look at the figures so i usually don't read anything else at first i usually just go straight to the figures and in the figures you can already see what kind of results they have how they are presented what kind of conclusions you can draw from it and it depends a little bit on how much knowledge you have in the field if you need for example to read the introduction or to actually read the text with the results and the methods but i'm now a little bit more further in my phd journey so usually i can just look at the figures and already know 95 of what's written in the paper so after i've gone through all the figures i may refer a little bit back to the results and the methods but usually i go straight to the discussion because i think personally that the discussion is the most interesting in a discussion it's usually what the reviewers thought of the paper for example and they point out some critical points that have to be bettered in the future or some further research questions so usually by reading this you can kind of think of some questions yourself and that could perhaps be the next paper for you to write so i think in general this method takes me about 30 minutes to skim through papers really quickly and then if i want to read them in more detail i usually put them aside for later so then the second step is to remember the papers better that you've just read and the way i do it i use notion of course so i'll pull off my notion page so in general in notion i made this page where i put all the papers i read and you have this web plugin in notion which you can just link through your papers so if i find the paper i will just click the web plugin and put this directly into my notion page then as i'm reading the paper i usually make screenshots of figures that i like and perhaps want to reproduce in my own work so these i just screenshot and put in the notion page and then i also make little voice memos and this i do with the notion app so i put the notion app on my phone this is not sponsored by notion by the way but i just love notion a lot so i put the notion app on my phone and then i just record the voice memos on my phone and i think by using voice memos instead of typing out what i like about the paper i usually get a little bit more critical because sometimes when i'm just typing as i'm reading the paper i usually just retype what i just read whereas when i use a voice memo i usually have to think a little bit more about my interpretation of what i read and i think this works for me a lot better to really understand what's being written in the paper and what i like or dislike about it yeah and then the last step is to put everything into the bigger context and i think this mostly comes with experience but when you just start out i think a good app that i use a lot is research rabbit so research rabbits makes these kind of beautiful trees of how all the papers in a certain topic are connected and i think this is a really good way because you can structure it by year for example but you can also structure it by how they cite each other and this just gives a really nice tree-like overview of all the papers in the field which then can help you to select your next paper or to kind of understand how your paper is placed within wider bigger papers yeah and then i have some final tips that i always use when i'm reading a lot of papers first of all is to use a paper reference manager whenever people tell me they don't use a paper reference manager i'm so surprised because they are super good for for example citing work or for collecting all the papers you want to read so in general i use zotero but i've used manly in the past as well and i think most of them work very similar so i would just pick a free one that you don't have to pay for and then the way i do it when i find a paper i use the web plugin of zotero and then it automatically imports it in zotero and then i put a little tag on it to be read and i also have the colors for that so red is for if i really need to read it and orange if is for if i might want to read it and then green if i read it and this for me really works to put all the papers or all the list of papers that i want to read and not get so overwhelmed then another tip i have is to set a set reading time i kind of have this from the tiny habit book and i think it's quite important to have a set time in your day at which you will be reading and i don't think it necessarily has to be papers but it's kind of good if it is papers but by having this set time you every day already read something like five to ten pages and then by the end of the week you already will have read plus 70 pages and i think this makes managing all the things you have to read so much easier than if you push everything to one day and have to read 70 pages in one day yeah so these are all the techniques and tricks i've learned over the last two years if you have any tips for me or some apps that you really like to use i would love to hear them so put them down in the comments below and if you're now writing your literature review i wish you all the luck and see you next week bye

Channel: Charlotte Fraza

Views: 269,793

Keywords: phd, research paper, reading research, reading paper, research, literature, phd life, how to read journal articles efficiently, phd student, critical reading, reading critically, literature review, zotero, mendeley, how to read a scientific paper, grad school

Id: EXALI6jFu6E

Length: 7min 37sec (457 seconds)

Published: Sat May 14 2022