What I learned reading 1 paper a day in 2020, a thread #phdchat

I read 253 articles/reviews this year (every business day in Brazil). I took the advice of doing this from my supervisor and other researchers I admire.

I made a 450-pages file of my notes, classifying papers by the different subjects related to my PhD project.

From this I could learn a lot more from the basic topics in my research and also create lots of connections and hypothesis that for sure will guide me to a PostDoc project and for when I become a PI.

I really encourage PhD students to do that, not as another pressure, but as a motivation when the experimental side is not going the way you expected, you can really make discoveries and get new data from literature analysis.

Actually reading more provides points of views you never had looking to your data and personally my own project got a totally different course after learning some cool stuff.

Every day you can sit in front of the computer and read what you WANT to in that day. Reading makes you read more and be more curious about stuff. You will enjoy finding out who and how the discoveries in your field were made.

You can start with reviews, and then reading all the references that caught your attention, it is interesting to find out how research was made 30 years ago.

You will be up-to-date in the latest discoveries in your field. I use the @ResearcherApp to receive papers related to keywords I am interested.

Organizing the notes is essential for making it easier to write the thesis and paper when you need to. I also link every paper to the reference in my @mendeley_com account, so when I need to cite them I just need to copy and paste.

I will be glad to talk to anyone that got interested in this!