Nearly every major journal has its own RSS feed, as do preprint servers - look for the orange icon on their home pages. RSS allows users to subscribe to content from specific websites. RSS (‘Really Simple Syndication’) feeds provide, well, a really simple solution. I also signed up for journal e-mail alerts, but these quickly overwhelmed my inbox, and I soon started to ignore them. But because I often got distracted by irrelevant tweets, that wasn’t very efficient. I used to find new papers by aimlessly scrolling through science Twitter. In the two-plus years since, I’ve iterated through many versions of my workflow, and after lots of trial and error, I’ve finally found a literature-management system that works for me. But rather than devastation, I felt relief: I realized that it was time to give my workflow a major overhaul. The volume of papers was so overwhelming that I found myself procrastinating, making the problem even worse.Īt some point, having so many open browser tabs caused my ageing laptop to crash, and all my tabs were lost. I frequently misplaced my reading notes, or failed to take good notes in the first place, and had to read the same papers again. I had no way of tracking whether I was missing key studies in my topic area, and no system for keeping up with the new papers coming out daily. Yet despite good intentions, my efforts fell flat, due in large part to inefficiency. I spent long hours poring over papers, determined to master the literature in my research area. It was an important period of transition: I was working out what project I would focus on for the next five years, and knew that success would require a strong intellectual foundation. I was in the first year of my PhD programme, having just joined my thesis laboratory. “I’ll read that later,” I told myself as I added yet another paper to my 100+ open browser tabs. Many researchers struggle to keep on top of all the papers they need to read.
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