The Search
Researching and finding new information should be an Academic’s bread and butter, but it’s not always as simple as “Googling it”… or is it?
Some topics have decades of literature to trawl through, and peer-reviewed articles are the gold standard. You have to know what’s already out there before you can figure out where the gaps in the literature are, but you either have to go through hard copies in libraries or use online databases with expensive subscription fees. Academic Search Engines like Google Scholar are trying to disrupt this model of information access, but are they worth your time?
Can they be a “one-stop-shop” for your reports and assignments and help you work smarter, not just harder?
I recently wrote an article on Academic Search Engines for Times Higher Education, and if you’re interested in Google Scholar or similar databases you can read more about them or watch the video. These tools are quicker to use for an initial broad scope of the field and you can often access full-text versions of articles for free. If your institution provides you with access however, traditional databases are still better for exploring the full depth of your research question, especially when you dive into discipline-specific topics.
The Root of the Problem
As I spent a few days comparing different search engines and online databases, I came to terms with the fact that all of them are amazing. You can’t really go wrong with any of them, and it’s just so much more convenient than looking through physical volumes of journals in the library (yes I’m old enough to remember having to do this).
Now does this mean my literature review “pipeline” is more streamlined than ever? No - in fact writing papers is just as tumultuous and convoluted as it’s ever been. It turns out that the root of this problem is NOT the quality of the search tools I had access to, but how I made the best use of what was available to me at any point in time. Your thought process in planning a literature review should not be entirely dependent on one specific research tool and there are some common sense approaches that I’ve found helpful over the years:
Planning your search strategy
Working in the molecular biosciences, you generally don’t need a sophisticated search strategy. Simply type in the name of the gene or protein you’re working on, and start reading in chronological order. As your work starts to tie into other disciplines however, you will need to include other key terms into your search. A basic search strategy would involve:
Write out your research question or topic in 1-2 sentences;
Underline key words and prepare a list of synonyms for each;
Try different combinations of keywords and synonyms, applying different filters if you want to expand or limit your search results.
Import/Export
Now that you’ve generated an overwhelming amount of reading material for yourself, it’s very easy to just skim or speed-read through as many of the abstracts as you can. Bookmarking these articles in your browser or saving them in online reading lists feels too superficial for my brain - I need to download all the PDFs onto my computer. No printouts though - saving trees and minimising desk clutter go hand in hand.
I rename each PDF using specific conventions:
“<Year of publication>-<Surname of first author>-<topic of article>.pdf”
That means instead of seeing “z0w983758391.pdf” in my folders, I can find papers by their year of publication and author at a glance without having to open each file one by one. Sorting by publication year is one click away and it comes in handy when writing the introduction to a paper, where a chronological recounting of the field helps set the scene. I used to keep a separate spreadsheet with synopses for each paper, but I’ve found that the “Date-Author-Topic” filename structure is enough for me to remember its contents over time. I do know researchers who swear by customised tables with their own interpretation of articles’ research findings, so your mileage may vary on this one.
Sum of the Parts
Just because you have a paper on your hard drive doesn’t mean you can effectively integrate it into your academic writing. As I download each paper, I am putting together a dot point description of how it’s relevant to the paper I’m writing. This process is mechanistic and not reliant on (much) creativity - I can easily add 50 references to my paper within a couple of hours and I have a rough outline sketched out on the page. That’s how I get around the “Curse of the Blank Page”, with a list of relevant references that I can then spend time organising and re-ordering within the flow of the manuscript.
Google Scholar lets you download references in a format compatible with reference management software, and I am very much an Endnote fanboy. As you’re downloading the PDFs of your papers, you should be able to add the reference into an Endnote library at the same time without much fuss. From there I’m adding the references from within my Endnote library using the “Insert Citation” functionality integrated into Microsoft Word. Bibliographies are sorted and formatted by the software in whichever referencing style you’d like, and it’s just one less thing to worry about during final copy-editing.
A Work in Progress
As I said earlier, the tools are no longer (or perhaps never were?) the hurdle for my academic writing, and it ultimately comes down to our understanding of the field to organise the existing information. Looking ahead, I want to spend more time writing and less time giving myself excuses for why nothing’s on the page.
Jack.
