Reading Papers

Table of contents

1. Reading Papers
   1. Reading papers
   2. Reading Tips
   3. Finding Papers
      1. Google Scholar
      2. Other
   4. Organizing Your Literature
   5. Getting up to Speed

Reading papers

This section goes over general advice for how to read papers, find relevant publications, organize your literature, and suggests which papers to read for each subgroup.

Reading Tips

• Use Mendeley or other reference manager to organize the literature. Use the watch folder functionality.

• Read in the following order: conclusions/summary –> intro –> figures/captions –> whole paper.

• Summarize the main results in a power point slide.

• Practice makes perfect: you will get more efficient at reading papers over time, don’t worry if it is difficult initially.

• For less important papers, be judicious with your time, focus on paper sections with info which is new to you.

• For a “quick and dirty” read of a paper, read the introduction and figures. The introduction gives you the background/significance of the work and summarizes the papers approach and results, while the figures summarize the data and techniques used in depth.

Finding Papers

Google Scholar

Searches: Search Google Scholar using quotations around key terms you want in a reference. Look through ‘related references’ and ‘citing references’ for relevant papers.

Citation Alerts: For particularly important papers, set a ‘citation alert’ on Google Scholar, this will notify you of new papers which cite the original paper.

Author Alerts: For important authors in your field, you can set ‘author alerts’ on Google Scholar. This will notify you when an author has new papers out.

Other

• Connected Papers is a site which uses citation networks to suggest new papers. Input a paper you know is important, and allow a few minutes for the citation graph to generate. This can help find new papers which don’t necessarily have similar keywords or cite each other (google scholar is better for this)

• ACS publications are important in our field. Looking through recently published and preprint papers in relevant journals can help.

• We have dedicated Slack channels for posting new/interesting literature. Look over new suggestions and check the history!

• UC Davis Library Subject Guides for Chemical Engineering, Chemistry, and Materials Science link to and summarize the major scientific databases for each subject (scroll down to ‘Major Databases’)

Organizing Your Literature

• Use your reference manager’s folder feature to create descriptive folders for important subtopics. For example, you could have a “Ethane Oligomerization” for research papers studying that reaction and a “Methods” folder which has papers on new computational methods in your field.

• Maintain a slide deck for each important subtopic with paper summaries. This will make it easy to do your lit reviews.

• Use your reference manager’s tagging feature to note which papers are important, unread, challenging etc.

• Each time you download a paper, make sure the citation information is correct, do not blindly trust your reference manager! You can often download the correct citation from the webpage you downloaded your paper from. This will save you a lot of time when you are making a bibliography

• Keep the collection of references for a paper you are writing together. This makes them easy to find, reference, and fix when you are writing.

Getting up to Speed

• The group maintains a literature repository of papers each student should read here.

• Look for relatively recent review articles in your field. You can use their citations to learn a topic in depth.

• Look for highly cited researchers in your field: What are they doing? What buzzwords do they use?