Reading is an essential activity in (almost) any research endeavor. Science communicates its knowledge primarily through scientific articles. If you do not read the relevant scientific literature, you do not know what the status quo of knowledge in a given field is. And if you do not know the status quo of the field, you do not know what research would be relevant to conduct to advance the knowledge in the field. Also, in your own scientific articles, you will typically have to include a section summarizing the status quo of the field (think: ”Theoretical Background”, “Literature Review”). In short, there is no way around reading when doing a PhD.
Bad news: Reading takes time. A LOT of time. Mind that reading a scientific article is not the same as reading a website or a novel. To make the most of that time, you may want to consider both how you read and what you read.
<aside> 📑 A good guide on how to read scientific articles is available here.
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As said, reading a scientific article is not the same as reading a website or a novel. Also you can (and should) read a scientific article in different ways, depending on your needs. Ultimately, reading is a skill that requires practice - you will become much better at it throughout your TME PhD journey. To get you started, a useful heuristic when reading scientific articles might be:
| Category | Description | Required time | Do if … |
|---|---|---|---|
| Skim read | Skim-reading the article (e.g., title, abstract, introduction, conclusion). | 2 to 10 minutes | Title sounds interesting |
| Quick read | Reading the full article (or relevant parts of it), highlighting text, identifying key references. | 30 min to 2 hours | Article interesting/ |
| relevant based on skim read | |||
| Deep read | Reading the full article, highlighting text, taking notes, reading into references, connecting to other articles, writing summary, etc. | 4 to 8 hours | Critical article for your PhD research |
A good strategy might be to start with a skim read of the article. If the article still seems interesting/relevant, continue to a quick read. If you feel like this is a critical article for your PhD research, consider a deep read. In any case, be reflective and honest to yourself with regards to how you read and what you need. It is tempting to trick yourself into “I have read 6 articles today, what a productive day!” - while you might not have learned anything.
As you start reading scientific literature, you will (likely) quickly realize that there is always more to read (as there is also always more data to collect and more papers to write, of course - see On doing “good enough”). For every article that you read, you may find 5 more interesting articles to read in the reference list. Follow this process along for a few times and you might find yourself deep inside the Google Scholar rabbit hole, reading into a topic/theory that will get you nowhere in your PhD. At the same time, you might miss out on recent publications which are “spot on” regarding your research interests. Going to the other extreme, only reading literature which is “spot on” might keep you “boxed in” in the field’s current thinking. You might miss out on opportunities to provide fresh inputs and perspectives to the field.
Deciding on what is relevant and what is not is difficult, and there is no clear way to tell before you read. In general, it might be a good idea to keep a reading backlog in the form of a Kanban board (e.g. with Notion, see help here or ask ‣). Especially with the help of tags, you can keep track of which topics to focus your reading on.
You can (and should) of course remain flexible. Sometimes it is best to “go with the flow” and just read on where it leads you. From time to time, though, you might want to step back and reflect on the relevance of what you are reading. A reading backlog (or similar) might help you with that. Also, what you read should correspond with other Research activities (Doing research), especially Conceptualizing/ ideating (research design) and Writing.
Finally, you may want to consider creating research alerts. For instance, you can receive email notifications every time a new article gets published in a certain journal, or every time a new article is published containing a certain keyword. Just google “[Journal name] alerts”, “Web of Science alerts” or similar and you will find your way.
Sometimes you know exactly what you want to read (e.g., a specific journal article) but it can be hard to find it. Below is a suggested strategy for getting access to what you want to read: