In the information age, staying on top of all the relevant research is extremely overwhelming. Below is what I would generally recommend to anyone looking for some guidance on how to mange the onslaught of papers; as well as some useful tools. ### 1. Reference managers Using a reference manager will help you stay organized as you come across papers for years to come. This is a must for any serious researcher/academic. I use [Zotero](https://www.zotero.org/) because it's free[^1]. There are a few other options like [RefWorks](https://www.refworks.com/refworks2/?) and [Mendeley](https://www.mendeley.com/). Choose whatever suits your needs best. [^1]: Check out [[Backing up Zotero]] to learn about long-term management of these files. ### 2. Google Scholar Updates You probably have a decent understanding of the researchers that you think are doing the most important work and driving your field. Google Scholar has very useful email alerts that you can sign up for that inform you when specific people (or those who do work related to them) publish papers. Use this tool to strategically follow whoever you think is most important and you'll get a fairly decent coverage of important papers. Then you can set up a folder in your inbox that collects these and, if something looks interesting, file it into Zotero for later reading. ### 3. Knowledge Management What you are reading is my own effort to manage the knowledge that I come across. It can be called an [[External Brain]] or [[Zettelkasten]] but really it's just a way for me to organize information that I think is interesting. A lot of this has to do with academic research, but I also store random stuff like [[00 - Recipes | recipes]] and [[00 - Locations Map | locations]]. Using a knowledge management system like [Obsidian](https://obsidian.md/)[^2] allows you to easily make connections between interesting papers/ideas/etc. and keep track of everything that you learn. Also, by "tending the garden" that is your knowledge management system — i.e., going through the process of building it and constantly refining it over time — you will more easily learn the information that you include. [^2]: There are other options, like [Notion](https://www.notion.so/) or [Typora](https://typora.io/). ### 4. Useful literature review tools - [Elicit](https://elicit.org/search): A really powerful tool that allows you to directly ask it questions and will return papers it thinks will answer that question. Relies on machine learning and language models. - Check out this [research workflow](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YO9UiBWx6jw) for some good ideas about how to use it. - [Connected Papers](https://www.connectedpapers.com/): Input a paper and it will return a network of connect papers. Can be very helpful to kick start a literature review or find less known papers that are relevant to your research question. - [Research Rabbit](https://www.researchrabbit.ai/): Looks pretty cool, but I haven't tried it out yet. - [Open Knowledge Maps](https://openknowledgemaps.org/index): Map a research topic. Similar to Connected Papers but for topics, not papers. - [Inciteful](https://inciteful.xyz/): Seems similar to Research Rabbit. Haven't tried it much. First try broke the site. 😅 ### 4. Using Large Language Models for summarization [[LLM software|ChatGPT]] is extremely useful for summarizing academic literature. See [[Large Language Model Prompts]] for some stuff that works well. ## Can't access a paper? Check out [`sci-hub`](https://sci-hub.st/). --- #### Related #academic_resources