Ruthless reading

Even for hard-working scientists, projects usually move forwards quite slowly. However, there are an awful lot of scientists today. This means that keeping up to date with the output from this army of academics is a major challenge. As a Ph.D. candidate you are aiming to become nothing less than a world expert in your own research. You need to know your stuff. Any large pile of photocopied research papers is inherently unstable and liable to rearrange itself into a random order at the slightest provocation. Once you amass such a stack of unread papers, you will probably never get to the bottom of it. To get through a Ph.D.'s worth of reading, you need to develop surgical ruthlessness. Become relentlessly efficient with your reading and the sheer vastness of the ever-expanding literature can begin to seem manageable.

The first step in ruthless reading is to be disciplined about organising your regular hunting forays into the literature. Leave it too long between your paper harvesting sessions and you will reap too many to read in one week – then they begin to pile up. Citation and journal databases like the Web of Science (wos.mimas.ac.uk), and referencing software like Endnote (endnote.com) make literature searches and reference-handling a piece of cake. But, however good your software, you still need to know exactly what you are searching for. Compile a definitive list of your keywords and try including important authors' names as well as key scientific terms.