Literature, the basis of scientific research. Learning starts from "reading" and goes deep from "reading". It is necessary to refer to relevant literature when doing experiments and writing papers. "Reading literature" is the most basic and necessary ability as a scientific researcher, how do you do it? Listen to Daniel's dry goods sharing, and practice a nirvana for academic counterattacks...
One of the best scientific researchers: I have worked for half a year from Ph.D to now, and published 12 papers and 7 first author.
I still keep the habit of reading at least 2-3 articles every day. Reading documents has different reading methods, but the most important thing is to summarize what this document says. Otherwise, it’s just a free reading. Understand that once you close it, you don’t know anything. This is a taboo in reading literature. It wastes time and, most importantly, fails to develop good habits, leading to reluctance to read literature in the future.
1. Every time you finish reading the literature (whether it is a close reading or a rough reading), close the literature and think about it. What is the most important take home message of the article? If you don’t know it, look for it in abstract, conclusion, and discuss it. Better to check. In this way, an article will pass. Take home message is actually not a lot, basically some concepts, if you find that you need to remember a lot, it is often not the point of reading.
2. Expand the reading method of knowledge, focus on the introduction, look at the problems raised by others, and the current progress of similar articles, read one or two articles a day, and basically have a general idea of a certain direction in this field within a month Understand, read a good review is fine, but such people tend to be lazy.
3. In order to write the reading method of the article, when reading the article, especially when reading the discussion, you see good English sentence patterns. It is best to consciously remember who the author is, which article, and which journal. In the future, it will be more efficient to write pictures of cats and tigers. It's much better than trying to figure out a sentence for a long time there. Of course, the more you read and the more you write, the fewer sentence patterns you need to remember. In fact, it is very simple. If you consciously summarize and remember billions, it is not easy to forget.
Scientific research talent two: tell graduate students how to read documents and how to write papers
1. Look at the overview first
Reading the review first can better understand the subject, know what has been done, what you want to do, and what problems are still unsolved. There are generally many voices of criticism of domestic literature, but it is your entrance to quickly understand your research field. After that, you will read the foreign literature more quickly than the foreign literature directly at the beginning. However, foreign reviews are mostly written by veterans of the discipline, covering a wide range, which can make people do more with less.
2. Targeted selection of literature
Find a similar paper to read in your own direction, understand what questions are answered in the article, what technical means are used to prove, and what conclusions are there? Learn about research ideas, logical inferences, and learning techniques from these articles.
1. Keyword and subject term search:
Key words and subject words must be selected well, so as to ensure that the content you want is comprehensive. Because, by changing the subject heading, new content can appear.
2. Search for a scholar:
After checking the SCI, I got to know a certain scholar who has made achievements in this field and looked for his recent articles.
3. Reference summary search:
If you have a review that is related to your subject or has an entry point, you can find those original research papers based on the corresponding references.
4. Pay attention to the reference value of the article:
The impact factor of the publication and the number of citations of the article can reflect the reference value of the article. But pay attention to how other articles referencing this article evaluate this article.
3. How to read the literature
1. Pay attention to the abstract: The abstract can be said to be a window of the paper. Most articles read the abstract, and a few articles read the full text. There are not many full texts that are really useful. Excessive pursuit of full texts is wasteful, and you cannot go to extremes. Of course it is not right to just look at the abstract. After browsing the titles and abstracts of most articles, you can directly take a look at a few figures and titles and legends, and you can generally grasp most of them.
2. Read the full text: The first time you read it, you must be careful, and strive to understand the meaning of each sentence. It is better not to look up the dictionary first. Because the purpose of reading a paper is not to learn English, but to obtain information, after looking up the dictionary, thinking will be very confused, and often I don’t know what to say when I read it completely. You can mark new words in the process of reading, and look up their meanings after reading the full text.
3. Summary : Longer articles are easy to forget. Fortunately, although the sentences of the paper are long, but the number of sentences in each paragraph is not many, each paragraph can be marked with a title with a phrase.
4. Establish the structure of the sentence and grasp the theme : There is a trick to reading the original English literature. We know every word after reading it but don't know what he is talking about. This is the biggest problem. When reading, you must see a large number of relational conjunctions, and they lead the full text. Chinese people like to list facts, give a point of view and then a lot of facts. This is also the characteristic of Chinese literature. We have been reading such articles since we were young and we are very comfortable. Western literature pays attention to logic and reasoning. It is very strict from beginning to end, just like reading in GRE. It does a lot of repetition, supports and refutes new and old opinions, and has strict outlines, especially good magazines. The more prominent it is. It is often easy to find the subject of each paragraph. A lot of useless information can be passed along, saving you a lot of precious time and energy.
5. Increase the amount of reading: Since I have just come into contact with this field, I have no idea about many issues, it is very difficult to read, and many contents cannot be read. Later, as the amount of reading increased, it could finally be integrated. Therefore, for novices, attention should be paid to the number of reading documents, as the accumulation of more, the natural development from quantitative change to qualitative change.
four. Improve reading efficiency
1. Focus on time to read literature:
The more time spent reading literature, the more time wasted. Focusing on time makes it easier to connect and form an overall impression.
2. Make records and marks:
The copied or printed documents are directly marked or annotated with a pen. For documents in pdf or html format, you can use the editor to highlight or change the text color. This is another important means to avoid wasting time. Otherwise, it means nothing.
3. Reading order:
Choose the appropriate order according to the reading purpose. Generally, look at abstract and introduction first, then discussion, and finally result and method (combined chart).
Five, the collation of documents
1. When downloading electronic documents (caj, pdf, html), paste the title of the article as the file name (the file name cannot have special symbols).
2. Store different themes in different folders. The title of the folder should be short, such as: PD, LTP, PKC, NO.
3. The documents that have been read are put into subfolders, and at least the useful and useless should be separated.
4. For important documents, add 001, 002, 003 number before the file name according to their importance, and then arrange the icons by name. The most important documents will be ranked first, and important documents should be tracked. If you are lucky, you can get more clues. If you are not lucky, you will find that others are ahead of you, so you can modify your experiment accordingly.
6. English article writing
1. Read the literature at ordinary times and pay attention to summarizing common sentence patterns and phrases (note that the author of the literature must be a native English speaker, and the content of the literature should be related to your major).
2. Find 3-5 articles with technical routes and statistical methods close to your subject, and read them intensively.
Scientific research talent three: read papers efficiently
I am a material major. I don't have a good foundation in English, and I haven't passed the sixth level. So I basically read very few foreign language documents when I was a master. I regret thinking about it now. I have learned a lot less in 2 years. After getting a Ph.D., I have positioned myself a little bit higher, and I started to bite the bullet and gritted my teeth and read more foreign literature. At first, it was slow to read, and some were difficult to understand. Until now, I read about it carefully. I have read 100 foreign language documents and extensively read 100 foreign language articles. I have benefited a lot. I don’t read Chinese much now. I do feel that the quality of foreign language is high (there are also bad articles). It went smoothly. Talk about a few personal experiences.
1. First look for 5 foreign language articles that are most relevant to your paper. Spend a month to read it carefully and repeatedly. It is required to read all of them . If you don't understand, you can communicate with classmates and teachers. One month later you are on the road.
2. How to read the title: Don't ignore the title of a paper. After reading the title, think about how you want to express the title in one sentence, and guess what the author's paper might be based on the title. Sometimes a longer headline asks you to write, you may not be able to express it yet. You can learn from it next time you write.
3. How to read the summary: Take a quick look, here is a brief introduction to what this article has done. It may seem uncomprehending at first. Don't get discouraged at this time. No matter what it is, you may understand it when you finish reading this article. Because the abstract is very concise, many preconditions and conditions are omitted. It is normal that you cannot understand the abstract when you first see the abstract and do not understand the author's intention.
4. How to read the introduction (foreword): When you understand some of your research field, it should be easy to read the introduction. They are all introductory things, and they should be written similarly, so read more documents After reading this part of the content, it will be very quick and it will be swept away. Some foreigners write so classic sentences that you need to jot down, and you can use them next time you write them.
5. How to read the material and experiment: When you read a lot of literature, this part of the content is also very simple. It is nothing more than an introduction to the test method, how to do the test yourself, and you will be able to read it soon.
6. How to look at the results of the experiment: This part of the results must be viewed in conjunction with the graphs and tables in the results, so that you can see it quickly, mainly to understand the results of the experiment, and experience the author’s expression methods (for example, the author uses different sentence structures to describe some numbers the result of). Sometimes I think about it after reading it: With just such a small result, others can actually write so much at a large length. What if I could finish talking in half a page?
7. How to look at the analysis and discussion: This is the focus of an article and the most time-consuming. I generally do not rush to see the analysis and discussion after reading the previous part. I would like to make these results. How would I write this part of the analysis and discussion? Then slowly watch the author's analysis and discussion, carefully understand the author's point of view, for my use. Of course, sometimes other people's opinions are relatively new and the analysis is more profound. When you see more, you will definitely understand more and more, and your own ideas will become more and more.
8. How to read the conclusion: At this time, the conclusion will be clear at a glance. After you finish it, look at the summary again. In fact, it is almost the same.
9. Print out the downloaded papers and divide them into three categories based on their relevance to your subject. One category requires intensive reading, the second category requires extensive reading, and the third category requires selective reading. Staple together separately.
10. Don't leave it alone after reading the literature . You must review it for 3-4 months . You can compare your own test results as needed.
11. Learn to take notes, important conclusions, classic sentences, and delicate test plans must be written down for reference and study.
12. Some documents with the same test method and different conclusions can be read critically. I think if you do more experiments yourself, you should have the ability to judge who is more correct. The test methods are the same but the conclusions are different due to the following reasons: the test method is not described in detail, and the methods may be different; the test conditions are different; some authors exaggerate the results and make up data.
13. If you have time, it is better to read more literature. It is best to set a goal: to surpass your boss academically. Because bosses generally don’t read the literature, they do things based on experience, and they don’t know many new things. Gradually, your boss will find you great. Anyway, I feel that if I read more, I will read faster, and I will gradually like to read foreign literature, and I will gain more.
During the three years of graduate school, I did not do many experiments, but read a lot of literature. Someone may ask, how do you read the literature, especially in an unfamiliar field that you haven't touched before. My method is to look at the Chinese review first, then the Chinese doctoral thesis, then the English review, and finally the English journal articles. The advantage of this is that through the Chinese review, you can first understand the basic nouns, basic parameters and commonly used preparation and characterization methods of this line.
I think this is very important, because if you start directly in English, if you simply translate some basic nouns for granted, you will often lead to misunderstandings or ambiguities. At the same time, the Chinese review contains a large number of English references, which lays a foundation for the subsequent search for documents.
Chinese doctoral dissertations, especially in recent years, often contain more information than a review in the preface or introduction of the first chapter. Because it will introduce the background and related theoretical knowledge of the field in more detail, and it will often mention the relevant research directions of several scientific research groups at home and abroad that have done well in this field. You can clarify the context more clearly by reading.
English reviews, especially those invited papers or published in high-if journals, are often written by experts in the field. In this regard, it is necessary to read and analyze the structure of the article, especially the author's evaluation of the advantages and disadvantages of various directions, as well as the improvement and prospects of the shortcomings. By intensively reading a good English summary, you can not only gain an understanding of the current development of the field, but also learn a lot of authentic English expressions. Finally, look up and read relevant English literature for your own topic.
English literature
Now the databases in the university libraries are relatively complete, and even if there are none, documents can be obtained through various methods on the Internet. Therefore, the acquisition of documents is not a problem, the problem lies in what kind of documents to check and how to read and organize the documents. According to my experience, I think there are four types of English documents we need:
1. Literature of core journals in the field.
There are different core journals for different research directions. For example, the IF of the core journal of ceramics, Meitao, is only 1.5 a few, but the above articles, especially feature artical, are worth reading carefully. Of course, first of all, you have to understand the core journals you are studying. This depends on the mutual help of seniors, bosses or online comrades.
2. Articles by experts in the field
There are several so-called leaders in each field, and the direction they are engaged in often represents the current mainstream of development. Therefore, reading the literature in these groups can grasp the current research focus. Someone here may ask, how do I know who is the best? I personally have two small methods here. The first is to search for keywords in this field in ISI, not too many, so you will find a lot of documents, and then use ISI's refine function, you can see which author has published more papers, in principle, generally publish papers A large number of people and research groups are the main ones in this industry. Another way is to first understand the relatively large-scale international conferences in this field, and then you can usually see the name of the invited speaker about the conference on the website of the conference organizer. Generally speaking, as the speaker who is invited to report They are all people who have a face and a face in the line.
3. Highly cited articles
Generally speaking, articles with high citations (if not by self-citation) are relatively classic articles. Either the idea is better, or the material performance is better, and the writing should not be bad. Read more of these articles, and experience the author's grasp of the article structure and the processing of graph analysis. I believe you can learn a lot from them.
4. Find the literature you need
The last is the literature you need to read when you have a certain background knowledge, start to do experiments and prepare to write a thesis. My personal experience is, first of all, we must be clear, what problem do you want to solve in the experiment? Is it to improve the original material or to create a new material or a new preparation method, or to use a new characterization method or calculation method. After clarifying this point, you can find the documents you need in a targeted manner. And often when you find an article that is similar to your research direction, through ISI's reverse check, you can find the literature citing it and the literature it cites, thereby building a literature tree and obtaining more information.
Document collation
In addition, one thing I want to mention is about the sorting of documents. In many cases, everyone is blindly downloading documents, holding on to the idea of going down first. There are often many documents, but they only occupy disk space. Documents that are not sorted and classified are not their own documents. What is the basis for classification? (Recently, a scientific research exchange group was formed. Interested friends can join the group to chat on WeChat yh10669500168)
I have a relatively simple and practical method, suitable for those who have a large amount of unread documents. It is only concerned with three points: the last part of the preface of the article (generally this part is to propose why the author should do this work, basis and method), the chart in the article (propose the representation method used and the performance change) and the conclusion (whether Achieved the set goals and whether improvements are needed). Of course, if all intensive reading believes the workload is not small. My opinion is to summarize the article in about 50 words as much as possible. To put it plainly is the purpose of the article (such as improving a certain performance or proposing a certain method) + characterization means (such as XRD, IR, TEM, etc.) + main conclusions (such as Product performance). After you summarize and sort dozens of documents according to this method, you will naturally have a general understanding, and then sort the documents according to your notes. When you need to explain and cite the paper, you will go back and read it. I think this will improve A lot of efficiency.