Staying on top of new research developments is a very important aspect of survival in academia. For most of us, this means we can never read enough papers. I am not sure if it is fortunate or unfortunate, but there are so many new papers being published everyday, keeping up can be a significant source of stress for even the most experienced academics. For grad students, who are expected to develop a solid grasp of older literature as well, staying current can feel like an utterly unreachable goal. I wish I could say I have solved this problem, but I struggle just as much as you do. Still, I would like to share a little about my current strategies in the hope that they may help other struggling academics feel just a little less stress.

I see three key problems for scientists in keeping up with the literature: discovery, organization, and synthesis.

Discovery

The problem of discovery is the problem of becoming aware of papers that relate to your project. I think it makes sense to divide this problem into two parts: the discovery of old papers and new papers. Old papers are papers related to your project that have already been published. These are papers you should know about because your science should build on the discoveries of the past. For old papers, you can’t escape doing a series of directed searches on something like PubMed, which is a service of the US National Library of Medicine. The NLM offers a full tutorial for people who are totally unfamiliar with what PubMed can do and various Quick Tours for people who just need a few pointers.

New papers are papers that will be published in the future, as you are performing your own experiments. It is important to have a game plan for building up a foundation for your work from the old papers, but you must also be ready to incorporate new publications into your system as they come up. If a new paper is published in your field, you don’t want to hear about it next year—you want to know about it now! The key here is being notified of papers of interest as soon as they go live. You can accomplish this by subscribing to the mailing lists of all your favorite journals, but then you have to wade through tons of unrelated papers to find the few that really interest you. You can also use PubMed’s saved search and e-mail alerts feature, but I get annoyed with anything that clutters up my inbox. The best way I have found to deal with this is combining PubMed’s saved searches with RSS. RSS, which stands for “really simple syndication,” is a way for you to have all the news you are interested in come to you instead of going out all over the Internet to collect it. For more information on RSS, Lee LeFever over at Common Craft made a great video called RSS in Plain English. Lee suggests using Google Reader, which will work just fine for our purposes as long as you remember to check it often.

When you run a PubMed search, you will see a little orange RSS icon below the search box. If you click on it, you can save the search as an RSS feed. Then, after adding the feed URL to your Google Reader account, you should see any new papers published under the keywords you searched for whenever they are added to PubMed’s database. If you do this for all the specific searches you are interested in following, you will never miss another new paper.

Organization

The problem of organization is fairly obvious. Once you find the body of literature that is related to your field, what do you do with it? The de facto standard for scientific publishing, for better or worse, is the portable document format or PDF. This means the biggest part of your organizational task is dealing with the hundreds or even thousands of PDFs you will collect that are related to your area of interest. Some people just print out all these PDFs to create mountains of paper on their desks and in their filing cabinets. This is just silly. Please don’t do this. If you do, you miss out on the most beneficial aspect of maintaining a digital archive, which is search.

There are several options for PDF organization, but I am only going to tell you about my favorite. Do yourself a favor and head over to Mekentosj.com and download Papers. They have a 30-day trial, so there is really nothing to lose. If you trust me, just buy it. You will love it. They also offer a 40% discount for students.

Papers is primarily a PDF database, but it can do so much more. It has built-in search support, repository matching for pulling in PDF metadata, and it can even help you with formatting citations and creating bibliographies when you finally want to write something. As if that weren’t enough, there is a great iOS version of Papers that allows you to sync your entire PDF library to your iPad for mobile or offline viewing. This allows me to have access to my PDF library while attending journal club meetings and seminars.

Synthesis

By far the hardest part of any academic workflow is taking the PDF database and turning it into something that is actually useful. You have to be able to synthesize all of this exquisitely organized information and integrate it with your existing knowledge in a way that helps you design new experiments that have never been done and learn new things that have never been known. To help with this, Papers has built-in support for PDF highlighting and annotations. You can add notes to the database entry or add them to the PDF itself as if you were writing on your paper copy. I like to highlight important or interesting points from each paper as I read it, but I also find it helpful to add a short note to each database entry when there is anything specific I know I will want to use that particular paper for in the future.

In addition to reading and annotating the PDF file, I have recently been using a personal wiki for note-taking. If you are on a Mac, I highly recommend a program called VoodooPad, which is currently being sold at a pretty steep discount. If you are on Windows, you may want to try the open-source WikidPad application. I am not sure about WikidPad, but one of the things I love about the VoodooPad/Papers combination is that you can right-click on a Papers database entry and copy it as a “Papers link.” This puts an application-specific URL on your clipboard that you can drop in your notes. Later, when you click the link, it directly opens the corresponding PDF.

Before I close, I just want to say that no matter how well-organized you are and how efficient you think your system is, nothing is going to get you out of the work of actually reading more papers. That said, the less friction you experience with the workflow, the fewer excuses you have for not getting more reading done.

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