so scientists have to read over a 100 papers a day and to keep up with this

literature is almost impossible for my last narrative review I also had to read up
to 200 papers I believe and to keep up with this and to truly organize remember and
reflect on everything you have read is the hardest skill to learn in this video I
want to show you my technique for doing this and I have divided it into two
sections first is to read as much about Fields you do not know about and the second
part is to keep up with the literature in a field that you are quite familiar with
I truly wished I had this video at the beginning of writing my narrative review but
I hope by giving it to you that it will help you a little bit with writing any type
of review you're writing or with reading and keeping up with the literature in your
field so let's get straight into it so the first part I want to talk about is
reading papers in fields you do not know about and this is because I think that a
lot of us want to learn about new topics and we try to read academic papers to do
so but find it quite hard and I think I've kind of developed a technique that can
help with this and to allow you to understand a new field as much as possible
through Reading papers so the first part of this process is paper selection so you
need to ensure that you have papers that are actually good and that's because
different from reading that you do at University is that papers are not always set
in stone and they're just the latest type of research but they're not necessarily
true research or always good research so there are a lot of papers that are just
not so good or even papers that were written 5 years ago that were trusted by the
scientific community and that turned out to have a hypothesis that was disproven
later so research is more of an iterative updating process than true knowledge set
in stone and because of this fact you need to be quite careful about the research
that you choose to read Because in research there are just a lot of facts that were
disproven so the way I do this is I usually ask my professor for the top 10 papers
that he recommends in a new field and if you don't have a professor you can also
look at this online for example through corsera there are usually a few papers
recommended or if you're interested in Neuroscience on the neurom match website
there are also a lot of papers recommended for specific Fields another thing you
can do if you don't have access through this type of information is to look at a
good review that was written I would say in the last 5 years but maybe even in the
last one or two years if that is possible and it exists out there so the second bit
is the reading strategy and the reading strategy that I use is quite similar to
reading strategy here that's called three bosses except that it's a little bit less
extensive I believe but also have a look there if you're interested in common
reading strategy that a lot of PhD students use so the way I go about reading a
paper is I usually first look at the title the abstract and the figures so I read
the title perfectly read the abstract and then look at the figures and that's just
to see is this paper actually in the topic that I want to learn about cuz sometimes
a paper has a certain topic or a certain title that you think maybe suits what you
want to learn about but when you read the abstract it's actually about something
different so this can already help you kind of curate the reading list that you
want to read afterwards I do read it sequentially in a field that I do not know so
for the second part of this video I will talk about fields that I do know about but
for fields that I don't know about I usually do read the introduction M's
conclusion and focus on the figures as well and this is because usually there are
some terms that I am unfamiliar with and that I will need to look up as I'm reading
through the paper so as I'm reading through the paper I usually highlight certain
terms that I don't know so much about and I would look them up afterwards on and
also something that I personally really like to do is to kind of visualize the
paper as well so I usually have the figures in mind and as I'm reading through it I
keep referring back to the figures to see if I can understand what's actually being
said so after you have read the paper in full it's time to kind of like dive into
the math and the finer details and I usually use multiple resources for this
because this is a field that you're probably unfamiliar with you want to use
different type of resources than just the paper because personally for me I find
really hard to only read in a topic that I know nothing about and truly understand
what's written so usually I listen to the top talks and you find these by just
looking at the first author or the last author and kind of Google their name and
then quite often there are talks of them in conferences for example that you can
kind of listen to and understand a little bit more about their topic cuz usually
that's introduced in a gor way during their presentation another thing I do is I
find related codes so for example a website is papers with code but also a lot of
papers nowadays have at the bottom of their paper a section that is called code
availability and there they list where you can find the code of their paper and I
find personally if I have the time and I reimplement some of the bits that they've
done that I understand it a little bit better also I would try to find relative uh
relevant blog posts for example quite often for a little bit older papers you can
find good blog post that explain it in a more easy Manner and lastly I would also
try to discuss it with peers so this is something that I've noticed that I find
really nice as a PhD student so as a PhD student you usually have access to people
in your lab that are interested in the same topic and I noticed when I really
struggled with a paper I would go to one of my colleagues or a fellow PhD student
and we would kind of sit down and maybe even explain little bits of the paper to
each other and of course if you cannot find this in real life it's also possible to
find this on the internet to look for friends that maybe are interested in the same
topic yeah and I think this is really where you go to the part of deeper
understanding of the paper so through this deeper understanding you really want to
focus on explaining the results to yourself without referring back to the paper so
for example something that I do to test if I have a deep understanding of the paper
is I would only have all the figures and try to explain it to myself or to a friend
or a fellow PhD student what I'm seeing in the figure and if I can understand the
results that are being presented to me another thing that is really good to do
during this point is to be quite critical of what you're reading so again research
is an iterative process so no research paper is perfect it's always just a little
test of a hypothesis that the authors have that they're presenting to you and you
as a critical reader can decide if you agree or don't agree with a certain argument
that is being presented and I think a really good exercise for this part is to
think by yourself what would be the next research question that I think needs to be
answered for me to make this paper more convincing so this could be for example
that you think that the sample size needs to be bigger you think that a different
type of statistical test should be used or maybe you feel that the way they
interpret their results are not fully sound with what you're actually seeing on the
paper also something that I would consider during this reading process is to read
multiple papers at the same time so I personally refrain from just reading only one
paper fully I I usually have about like five papers I would say on the same topic
and I kind of compare how different authors write about the same topic and what
kind of experiments they have done about the same topic and something that is quite
interesting is that sometimes authors find the exact same results but they
interpret it in different ways and that just shows you that as scientists we also
have biases or hypothesis that we preemptively believe and want to prove and
sometimes these go a little bit above the results that we're actually showing and
that it's not to say that these scientists are doing anything wrong but that they
are trying to prove their hypothesis to you and you can choose if you believe this
hypothesis or not so something that's very critical for me during this process is
to have a good reference manager and that's where paper pal come in and they were
so kindly to sponsor this video so I personally have always used reference managers
and there is a list of them out there but I think paper bell is very nice they have
a really intuitive interf face and I think among all the reference managers it's
probably the fastest to learn because it's already integrated fully with the Google
environments so I'll show you really quickly how to use it so one of the things
that you can do with paper pal is that you can search within paperpile itself which
I find really nice so within the paperpile interface you can use their search bar
and you have the ability to search online for books and articles without leaving
paper pal and you can also search not only for words or just the names of authors
but you can also search for full phrases which I think is really nice if you're
looking for certain phrases within a certain topic to add to your review for
example the second thing you can do to find literature is to add papers through
your library through the paperpile extension so the paperpile extension I will list
down below you can download and then you can click on this PE button in your
browser to save the reference you can add the
reference to folders and labels and add notes as you save the reference so for
example I've done this for my latest review which had a lot of normative modeling
papers and I just clicked and added it to my normative meling Library you can also
save papers directly from academic databases which I find really nice so for
example if you go to pet research RIT concess or Google Scholar which are all
research bases that I use you can directly add it to paper pal like that and lastly
if you work in Google Docs you can for example write a small snippet of your
research paper and then automatically already add your references as you're writing
and I find this really nice because then you don't have to interrupt your workflow
to think about how you're going to site the work that you're using so be mindful of
sighting correctly and definitely tools like paper pal or other reference managers
can help a lot with that so if you want to use paper pal to save you some time and
keep all your referenes well organized I will list a link down below so you can
check it out so the second part I want to talk about is Reading in fields that you
know about quite well and the reason for this is to keep up with the literature at
least in my field I think there are papers coming out about like 10 15 papers a day
and I set these kind of like research alarms in Google Al two keep me updated when
an author that I like or a certain search term is coming up in a new paper and I
think if you see the amount of emails that I get with like an alarm that a paper
has been published it's quite a lot let's just keep it at that and to keep up with
this type of L you really need to be able to read papers a lot faster than you did
in step one so I do think the reading approach for this then needs to be updated so
the way I do it is with this socalled fast reading approach that I've kind of
developed based on the three pass method but also based on my own knowledge and
that is I start with the abstract of course as always and I just read it quickly
and see if the paper is interesting and here I'm quite strict so if there's
anything that to me seems like a red flag I automatically remove it so for example
is the sample size too small do they use a statistical test that I find finicky is
there any type of terminology that I don't agree with and this maybe seems quite
strict but these are true red flags for me for papers that in my regard then are
not kind of like good to read fully so the next thing I do is I look at the figures
and I try to understand what the authors have done by just looking at the figures
so usually I actually don't really need to read the introduction and discussion
because because I already kind of know what the authors want to present and just
looking at the figures gives me a more clear view of what their results are without
muddling this with the preconceived bias that these authors have and the second
thing then I like to do is I want to compare their results with their methods so do
their methods match with their results so sometimes what I see is that for example
in their results they present something that looks intuitively quite nice so in
their figures but when I actually go to the methods doesn't really match up or it
doesn't really line so afterwards if I've seen the figures I've read maybe the
results and uh method section then I sometimes do like to go to the discussion
quickly to just see if their points of discussion match with the results that I've
seen and to be very honest sometimes this doesn't match at all so I've seen papers
where the results were very flimsy they didn't really show True significance and in
the discussion there are words being used like trending toward words significant
very big red flag by the way um and this is just in general a little bit a gripe I
have with the field and I think every field has its own pitfalls and I think that
is something that's a pitfall in neuroscience and sometimes also psychology that um
discussion or conclusion doesn't match the results actually being presented so be
uh wary of this so after I've done this something that I've done for my narrative
review so a narrative review is not a structured review if you want to do a
structured review find good YouTube videos on this or find a good article on how to
do this because this is a lot more organized but in narrative review you kind of
present the literature as you have found it and it's a lot less organized with the
Search terms that you use but the way I've done my narrative review I want to show
you quickly is that I used an Excel sheet so this is the Excel sheet for all of the
research papers that I read and I in this sheet noted down elements of the paper
that I might want to reference later and this really helped me to see overarching
teams and remember the differences and similarities between papers I and I actually
learned a lot doing this and I'm considering doing this for every paper I'm going
to write in the future because quite often you read over 50 papers and it's really
hard to keep a clear note of which results belong to which paper and also which
paper you can or should site when you're looking at different results also
something that I like to add as another column is this question of the follow-up
paper that I think these authors need to write and usually when I can answer this
question it does show that I quite understand what these authors have done and also
what I think is missing so it allows me both to kind of get an overview and also to
indicate that I've read the article critically so the last thing that I wanted to
end on is some tips for Effective reading that I've gathered over the last few
years first of all some tips for making reading a habit so so I really find it
truly important that you have reading as a habit or something that you do daily
something to do this is to make a dedicated reading time so possibly a specific
time during the day that you will always read one or two papers and maybe even put
it in a specific location like a library also make it enjoyable so make your
favorite drink for example a little coffee as you're reading and also something
that you can consider is to have a reading group so as I said you can gather
together a couple of your student students or a couple of students to make it into
a reading group for discussion and accountability the second thing for Effective
reading is to also read for creative ideas so I do think reading papers is very
important but I also think reading outside of papers is very important and this for
me actually taught me to speedread a lot more and to also enjoy reading a lot more
so something that you can do is to read outside of Science in books that are maybe
adjacent to science so for example you can consider pop science books I will list a
few here that I personally really liked reading and through reading these pop
science books although they're not always accurate I do think they teach you a way
of speaking about science that's not so dry and not so formalized also something
that you can consider is to write these little mini essays about topics I'm really
considering about making a video about this as well but I think if you write a
little mini essay about something that you're learning or something that you're
interesting interested about you will remember it a lot better and that's something
that I've been enjoying doing for the last few weeks and that I also want to start
posting on my blog that I will list down below so these were some tips for reading
in 2024 that I've gathered and kind of Quantified over the years I'm always
updating the way I read and I always try to learn new skills and I still don't
think my reading techniques are perfect so if you have any tips for me I would love
to hear them so put them down below also if you're interested in not taking and
reading I do think this video is maybe a good follow-up video and otherwise see you
next week bye