📚Reading

Reading is very important. Your goal through your PhD should be to develop good habits for reading regularly: with a good strategy to read both widely (at a high level) in areas peripheral to your immediate research area, and deeply of articles directly in your research area.

General

• A nice Science article with strategies for keeping up with the literature.

• And here is another nice Nature one.

The buzz

• If your field has a strong Twitter(/X) scene, and they are disciplined enough to avoid distracting personal posts, this can be an excellent way to find topical literature in your field.

  • Here's an article for how to get started on twitter as a scientist.

• Other options also exist, such as BlueSky, Mastodon, and LinkedIn.

• Can be important to follow the right people, and to mute the right people.

Direct from the journal's mouth: RSS feeds

• Journals have RSS feeds that push new articles into an RSS reader.

• This is a good/essential way to stay on top of new articles as they are published in a place that doesn’t fill up your inbox.

• You can also create your own custom RSS feeds (e.g., in Scopus) to track authors you’re interested in, or sets of keywords most relevant to your research.

• Feedly is a good free choice to manage your RSS feeds. You can access the results either online, or via a native app.

• On Mac/iOS, Reeder is a really nice one

  • Other options also exist.

Reference managers

• Zotero is the best reference manager available and is free. Essential add-ons:

  • Better BibTex (for workign with LaTeX, including automatically updating a corresponding .bib file for your full library), and

  • ZotFile (for synchronizing attachments via cloud storage, and working with tablets).

• Paperpile seems good, especially for those working with Google Docs.

• Mendeley is pretty poor.

• Readcube Papers is clunky and buggy and charges a regular fee.