was in the first year of my PhD programme, having just joined my thesis laboratory. It was an important period of transition: I was working out what project I would focus on for the next five years, and knew that success would require a strong intellectual foundation. I spent long hours poring over papers, determined to master the literature in my research area.
Yet despite good intentions, my efforts fell flat, due in large part to inefficiency. I had no way of tracking whether I was missing key studies in my topic area, and no system for keeping up with the new papers coming out daily. I frequently misplaced my reading notes, or failed to take good notes in the first place, and had to read the same papers again. The volume of papers was so overwhelming that I found myself procrastinating, making the problem even worse.
At some point, having so many open browser tabs caused my ageing laptop to crash, and all my tabs were lost. But rather than devastation, I felt relief: I realized that it was time to give my workflow a major overhaul.
In the two-plus years since, I’ve iterated through many versions of my workflow, and after lots of trial and error, I’ve finally found a literature-management system that works for me. Here’s what I do.
Step 1: find
I used to find new papers by aimlessly scrolling through science Twitter. But because I often got distracted by irrelevant tweets, that wasn’t very efficient. I also signed up for journal e-mail alerts, but these quickly overwhelmed my inbox, and I soon started to ignore them.
RSS (‘Really Simple Syndication’) feeds provide, well, a really simple solution. RSS allows users to subscribe to content from specific websites. Nearly every major journal has its own RSS feed, as do preprint servers — look for the orange icon on their home pages. You can even subscribe to specific PubMed or Google Scholar keywords, which update as new articles are added.
Step 2: manage
If you’re still formatting your references manually, you absolutely need to start using an automated system; the time saved in manuscript preparation is immense. But reference-management tools such as Zotero, Mendeley or Endnote provide more than just easy-to-create lists of references; they also store and organize your papers in a database with folders, keywords and tags. These programs provide browser plug-ins that allow you to save a paper with a single click, as well as word processor plug-ins to add in-text citations and build bibliographies.
When I find a paper that I want to read, I immediately add it to my reference manager. Then I can close the browser tab (so satisfying!) knowing that it’s safely stored so I can find it again later.
Step 3: read
This is the tricky part — you have to actually read the papers. The key is to set up a streamlined routine. Here are some suggestions:
Build time into your schedule. For example, I set aside a couple of hours on Friday mornings to read any papers I come across during the week.
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