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Ask HN: How do you scale up your scientific reading?

18 points by stepnovij ↗ HN
Everyone knows that the number of publications is growing every year, this is especially noticeable in biology. I'm wondering how other cope with this volume. Is it possible to scale up reading articles?

10 comments

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Jugurtha
Maybe it's curating that ought to be scaled. Most articles are a crappy product of a system where quantitative indicators are set, but qualitative indicators are forgotten.
stepnovij
You won't know if it's crap or not until you read it.
impendia
In my opinion (professional mathematician), one shouldn't try to scale up.

A generation ago, there were a hundred times as many articles as anyone could read. Now, there are a thousand times as many. (In 2018, there were 33,486 mathematics papers published to the arXiv. [1])

I believe that the best strategy remains the same: simply pick what you do want to read, and read it.

[1] https://arxiv.org/help/stats/2018_by_area

noud
100% agree with this (professional mathematician, previously in academia, now in industry). There is too much to read, so don't try to scale up. Reading articles take a lot of time and willpower and most articles that are published are usually crap. Instead, I (ab-)use opinions of others to figure out what to read. Often I share my work and ideas with others and ask for their feedback or suggested articles. People are better filters than any rss feed or newsletter.

Similar, I rarely read news. I think it's a waste of time. Instead I use that time to (globally) read Science and Nature. Very high quality articles that often have big impact in the world. I can suggest this habit to everyone.

stepnovij
You're right. It dependes quite a lot on the field. I am not a mathematician, but I have an assumption that in mathematics is not so dynamic. Biology is quite dynamic (but not as much as computer science). I think this is due to the fact that biology is an experimental science.
usgroup
This + when you find someone you like and can understand go consider reading everything else they wrote, look at their references, consider reading them too.
atrettel
I agree completely. There always has been too much to read, and the best strategy remains to read what you can while recognizing that you may be missing something. I make every effort to find as much related literature as possible but I am continually amazed by some of the work that I find years afterwards that I missed the first time around.

On a similar note, I remember reading a biography of physicist Lev Landau years ago (Dorozynski's The Man They Wouldn't Let Die). If I recall correctly --- and please correct if I am wrong --- there was a part where the author described Landau's intentional reluctance to read papers, at least early on in the research process. Landau wanted to formulate original approaches to problems, so he did not want his thinking influenced by how things were previously done. I do not agree with the idea but I do find it interesting that some researchers in the past have valued the opposite of reading widely.

impendia
My postdoctoral mentor didn't go that far. But he did say that when he read a book, and encountered the statement of some lemma or theorem, he liked to try to figure out how to prove it himself instead of reading the proof there.

There is also the infamous "exercise" in Serge Lang's algebra book (scroll to the bottom):

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B_pEp00B111JYWU1NmY4MjktZTN...

atrettel
I think your mentor strikes the right balance between awareness and originality. My criticism of Landau's idea is that it's a great way to make you think you have an original idea when you actually don't. Only a detailed literature search will verify its originality. I think that any attempt to "isolate" your thinking from others' thinking will fail because you cannot live in a total vacuum. At least some external thinking will influence you no matter what and we must acknowledge that. "Multiple independent discovery" happens all the time in science, and it's because everyone tends to operate in a similar environment.

I do agree with Landau that occasionally knowing how things are previously done could limit how you approach the problem, but that can be fixed by systematically reproducing or falsifying the previous results and drawing your own conclusions (trust but verify). You gotta get your hands dirty. It's slow and difficult but the right way in the long term.

DrNuke
Skim, do not read... if the work seems relevant to your interests and the best practices are followed, have a look at the conclusions. If still interested, have a look at the paper credentials, if it is peer-reviewed, from reliable publisher, etc. Pretty any good researcher out there has been peer-reviewed at least once in his career, be it a conference or a journal, so you can safely ignore vanity press, complete outliers and fully independent proponents.