A lovely blog popped up in my email, from ‘the thesis whisperer’ (yeah I’ve subscribed to something titled that, embarrassing, I know). It’s a must read and lives here: https://patthomson.net/2023/10/02/keeping-up-with-the-literatures/
It’s all about keeping up with reading, and reading papers specifically. It gives a big push for Browzine, which is an app with like a little bookshelf of journals you subscribe to, giving you a semi-realistic Experience of having the hard copy journals.
And likely will help you narrow down to the journals that you’re most into.
I’ve heard of this app and likely have it as an app on my phone, but for my way of thinking it’s a little limiting - journals are journals, it’s the authors that make them good - just as podcasts are often only as good as the guests they get.
But reading some advice around reading and engaging with ‘the field’ (your field) got me thinking of my own little process that has developed.
Now I’m not going to give tips and advice, as I’m in no position to do this. But my process is distinctly different to the one provided in the blog, which might make it interesting for others to consider.
And I really enjoyed at our academic introduction at UoM, one of the speakers mentioned ‘you’ve already reached maximum productivity and effectiveness, that’s why you’re here’ she continued, “so focus on doing good work instead of working harder, you’re already working as hard as you can”. And that seemed about spot on.
Indeed, “Academics given their very occupation are usually highly successful, high achievers and often have not learnt the coping strategies for receiving 'poor marks'. This is what a review can often seem like.” (Prestridge, et al., 2023, P.10). So, it’s coping with academic peer review and choosing the things worth pursuing.
But here’s the process:
So I use Google stuff lots.
I use google scholar to copy citations / references, and then tweak them if they’re obviously bad.
I’ve got Google scholar alerts set up for topics that interest me:
And scholars who do:
You can follow people just based on new articles, which will deliver you their stuff when published.
Related research works best for people who are hubs of research and sit right in your research or pocket of interest.
Every so often (roughly once a week) you get shot a little fleet of emails for whatever’s popped up around the themes you’ve set as alerts.
Skim the little blurb, the title and the journal (making sure it’s vaguely legit), then I’ll save a couple by sending them over to ClaroRead, which I use to read them to me whilst I cook, clean up toddlers toys and so on.
And as I’m listening, if a section is especially good I press the two buttons on either side of my phone to take a screen shot:
Then when I get around to it, and have pondered on the article and how it fits into my own writing (where applicable) - I’ll open the images folder and select the juicy part I liked, the clever iPhone means that this image is already converted into plain text that can be put straight into a word or google doc.
Then I’ll add page numbers as I drag the quotes in, finish up my writing, add a reference pulled from google scholar to the references list, and I’m on my way.
All of this type of blog writing is, with few exceptions completed entirely on my phone.
Let me know if this has been interesting or useful? I’d love to hear of other approaches to pull ideas from.
References
Prestridge, S., Mc Guckin, C., Hunter, A., & Hall, T. (2023). Mastering the writing game: practical insights for early career researchers and supervisors. Irish Educational Studies, 1-12.
Running Word Count (the second 100,000): 59,692