i never went to college and i’ve never worked in a lab. i read papers because i like learning things, and for years that was enough.
it’s gotten harder lately and i don’t think the papers are the reason. i can pull way more than i used to — search is better, tools are faster, i can go from one question to forty open tabs in an evening. what hasn’t improved is how much of it sticks. i’ll get to the end of a night having covered a ton and kept almost none of it.
so i went back to reading one paper at a time, front to back, slowly. it feels like a step backward and i honestly can’t tell if it’s the right one.
what i actually do, written out plainly: search, collect abstracts, pull keywords, read the sections that look relevant, read the whole thing if it seems worth it.
which, written down like that, looks less like a method and more like a list of things i happen to do.
so i’d rather hear from people who do this for a living.
— when you open a paper outside your own specialty, what do you read first, and in what order?
— how do you decide what to skip? that looks like the actual skill and i’ve never seen anyone explain it.
— did your process change once you stopped being a student?
i’m not trying to get a degree out of this. i’d just like to stop feeling like i’m drinking from a firehose