How do you keep up with the research in your field?
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.
In any practical sense, you might want to consider who your competition is. Who are the specific researchers that are publishing in your area, whose research you will want to track? If this list is either too long or not comprehensive, then you simply refine your area of focus until the groups that are active in that area can be listed and tracked.
Once you have this list, if you want to follow another journal or topic, you can add to it, but this would ensure that you are current on areas that are critical to your area of research.
On an alternate angle, you could try setting up litdb by CMU professor John Kitchin. I haven't tried it, but I find the idea compelling.
"The idea is you add papers to your database, and then you can search it with natural language queries, and interact with it via an ollama GPT application."
At least this would be a way to sift through large on-site databases of papers.