When starting on a PhD program, or when jumping into a new field, one of the first steps would be to do a literature search. In my opinion, the best way to do a literature review is to actually read a literature review. Simple, right? So, if you are a new grad student, seek out older grad students / faculty and talk to them. Make a list of review journals in your field. Then methodically comb them volume by volume. Get the most recent review article and read it carefully. Watch out for the cross-references, and track down the ones that you might think are interesting. A good review paper is 40-100 pages long. So, take your time to read it, and then again re-read it (along with the cross-referenced papers that seem interesting to you). By the time you are done, you probably have a fairly decent idea of your field; at least decent enough for you to take the next step, the next step being seeking and reading research articles in your field.
Now, at this stage, take some time out to find out about bibliographic programs that are available to you. Archiving the papers you read right from the start will save you lots of time later on, especially when you write research papers of your own. Personally, I find Endnote quite useful. But then, it is not free software. If your research group or library has a license, well and good. Otherwise, look for alternatives. And if you don’t have access to bibliographic software, you can still use good old Microsoft tools. In absence of softwares, to create a simple bibliographic file, simply open a Word document and create 3 columns. Each row is one record. The first column is the paper title. The second one has the author name and the third one has the keywords. If you have this information down, you can easily search for what you want later on.
Anyway, let’s move on to actually searching the papers. How do you search? Simple enough – use a search engine. For science and engineering, useful search engines are SciFinder scholar (this is not a freeware though), scirus, engineering village and google scholar. My favorites are the ScFinder scholar and scirus. In addition to using search engines, there is another method that I have found useful which is sort of the opposite of looking up references – i.e. look at citations. Use any good citation database (Web of Science works well for me, since that is what our university subscribes to. Scopus is good too). Once you find a paper of interest, look up the citation database to find out papers that have cited this paper you were interested in. Chances are, a fair amount of the papers citing the paper of your interest will also have information of interest to you. Apart from this, it is also useful to open a new email account and subscribe to email alerts from a number of top journals in your field. It takes less than 5 minutes to scan through the table of contents in the email alerts, and is a good way of staying updated.
So much about searching papers. Once you have found a paper, how do you read it? While I said one should read the review paper (referred to above) very carefully, I think how one reads the subsequent papers is quite different. Don’t read the whole paper at first! No, your time is too precious. First read the title. If you find it interesting, proceed to the abstract, otherwise dump the paper. Still interested? Proceed to the conclusions. Still liking it? Good for you. Now, read through the paper starting at introduction, all the way through to the results and discussions segment.
There, you have it. Few simple principles, but fairly effective.
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