How do you keep up with the research in your field?

WeAreWaves
2025-04-28T10:33:11Z

Do you have a weekly or daily routine? A preferred application?

For context, I’m an ecologist that focuses on statistics and modeling and I work in a few different ecosystems. I’ve always struggled to feel like I have a good understanding of the literature and I think there are a few main reasons.

Quantity: It’s overwhelming. There is so. Much. Research. And there’s more literally every day that is or might be relevant.

Sources: Relatedly, there are so many journals to try to keep up with. And certainly more that I should be keeping up with that I’m not even aware of.

Method: I haven’t found an interface that really works for me. I end up ignoring emails with journal table of contents. Scrolling through RSS feeds on Zotero or Mendeley is awful. Going to the journal websites is even worse.

Scheduling: I block out time in my calendar, but there’s always something else I’d rather work on. It’s hard to force myself to focus on it.

Workflow: The exploration-exploitation trade off. If I skim through all the titles of a bunch of different journals, I end up just spending the whole time downloading papers which then sit in my Zotero library without getting read. If I stop to look in more detail, I don’t get through much of the article list.

Retention: It’s hard to read something over and really retain it. I’ve taken notes (digitally and on paper) but that adds to the time it takes to skim titles and abstracts, which reduces the number I can cover.

One of the downsides of everything being digital is that I also find it harder to skim an article and get the gist of it. Flipping through a magazine lets you skim the titles and figures to easily get the main idea. Online, I need to read the title, click in a new tab if it seems interesting, scroll around to skim the abstract, and scroll and/or click to the figures. Flipping back and forth to the abstract or different sections is also harder.

What I’d really like is something kind of like a forum or link aggregator where I could skim titles and click an expander to view the abstract and figures.

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