Read a research paper effectively | Little known AI tools and tricks!

reading research papers quickly and effectively is so important during a phd and research in general you spend so much time trawling through papers finding the right ones extracting the

information and then trying to organize it all together can be an absolute nightmare so in this video i'm going to share with you the tools that you can use to actually make paper reading and

sort of understanding much quicker and more effective just beyond you know just reading the sections in a certain order and there

are two reasons in my research why i kind of read research papers the first one is the typical research path where i wanted to know what was new in the world

what i needed to know what was related to my research methods and skills that i wanted to bring into my own research and there's no getting beyond the fact that you do have to then read some very sort of like

dense papers in their entirety to really understand how you can incorporate their research into yours and find those gaps and there's also another reason a less kind

of in-depth reason why i read papers is because i just needed a citation right this is just some of the things i said in my introduction in other papers or my literature review

my supervisor would simply say needs a reference and i'm like oh okay and so i go in i type in keywords i try to find a paper that i can reference in my

my introduction or my paper whatever i'm doing and that is very sort of uh quick because you you only have to look at like one or two sections of the paper and i'll be talking about that in that

in this video as well you know if you just need a citation to back up what you're saying or support an assertion that you're making it can be very easy and we'll talk about

the tools that you can use to find those quick and easy kind of contextual references in this video all right let's get into it this video is brought to you by my newsletter go check it out at

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i'll see you there okay one thing i don't see enough channels talk about on youtube is when you are reading research papers effectively you actually need to

find the appropriate research papers quickly and be able to kind of separate them out from all of the rubbish all of the stuff that's on the side that isn't directly related and it can get really

sort of like confusing especially when keywords um start kind of you know overlapping some areas may use keywords that are similar to yours and it can get

a little bit muddy so really it's about finding the uh the the rose amongst the thorns is that how you say it but it's about finding the most important and

impactful papers in your field and then branching out from there there are three tools that i've seen and i recommend it comes down to connected papers

research rabbit and lit maps those three tools allow you to kind of use a seed paper and go out and explore the literature and it's much kind of easier than going to google scholar and relying

on search terms and ands and quotation marks and you know if you don't know how to search properly on google go check out those modifiers those search modifiers and they'll make your life a

whole lot easier so absolutely it relies on keywords and when you're writing your paper not enough effort goes into really selecting the right keywords and i talk about that in

my ebook and how to select the right keywords where to find them how to make sure people actually find your paper when they're searching for your research oh what was that um

and so yes keywords allow you to find papers and then using tools like the three that i mentioned you can also kind of branch out and there's typically one or two

very influential reviews or papers in your field that you can use to kind of branch out so that is how i would start make sure that you can

identify the most impactful papers and branch off from there once you have found your papers of interest you need to make sure that you

read them effectively so this is only the first step once you've got this kind of stack of papers a digital stack if it's on a file on your computer you need an easy way to kind of sort through them

and i like to start with the review papers the review papers are really cheap ways of getting loads of citations um if you sort of turn your

introduction of your thesis or the you know the literature review into into a review paper it's a really easy way of collecting loads of citations early on

in your phd so consider doing that if you haven't already but uh once you've got all of these research papers start with a like a review paper a review paper is one that looks at all of the research in the field and kind of

combines it into kind of a meta study and that is a really great place to start and then from there you can start identifying oh well this one's important and you can go read it now

when you pick up a paper the first thing you do is scan it scan the out of it like don't even worry about you know following sentences one

thing i do is i just pick it up and i go title abstract and just leave it at that initially if the abstract interests me i'll scan the figures and the tables and

i'll kind of look at the captions a really great paper and figures should completely have a caption that allows you to understand the figure

without having to read the text of the paper and so uh by just scanning title does that interest you yes move on abstract read that quickly does that

interest you yes look at the figures the figures and the tables will give you an idea of exactly what sort of research was done and then a certain figure may catch your attention read the caption

and that is how you kind of get a quick overview of what this paper can offer your research or provide to your document that you're

writing if something catches your attention when you have this first pass over this research paper title abstract figures and tables captions you can go

oh i wonder if in my other massive stack of uh research papers that i need to read i wonder if there's something similar in there there is an awesome new tool

called lateral.io lateral allows you to search amongst all of these research papers not only with keywords but contextualized kind of understanding they've got an artificial

intelligence that goes and scans all of these other papers so you can kind of start to connect the dots and then from there if there are similar kind of contextual understandings in these other

papers i would raise those to my top of my read list and then start to collect those together now this tool lateral io they've reached out to me and this isn't

a sponsored video but they've given me access to the beta version and you can sign up using my link below so go check it out in the description because you'll get free

access and immediate access to the beta version so go test it out i'd be really interested to know how you use it and what you think about it so lateral.io i think that's going to be a valuable tool

for researchers who want to read review papers journal articles and other kind of texts quickly and effectively the last and final step of reading a

research paper effectively is actually just you know going through everything else so once you've kind of collected this information the process we've been through is essentially allowing all of the important papers to bubble up to the

top once they're there you've looked at their title you've looked at their abstract you look to the figures and the captions you also then use that information to go away and bubble up other interesting studies using

lateral.io but now you've got this kind of collection of papers that are very important to you and this is where you now need to sort of like understand the

paper in much more detail and really there is no getting around simply reading the paper um but you don't read it from start to finish you can start

with the conclusions that's a very important part so go to the conclusions and be like okay does this exactly match what i want it to say is it super important to me and then

i'll look at the research details so the summary and the description and the discussion about what they've done and then the very last thing i read is the methods if the

methods are related to my research then they become very important but normally i don't look at the methods until i've read everything else and a research

paper is presented you know as this kind of like structure but as a scientist as a researcher you should not read it in that order because it's just going to waste a load of your time particularly

because research papers are dense they're thick they're full of kind of field specific terminology that are confusing to almost everyone that's even

a little bit outside of that field so yes read papers in this way use the tools i've mentioned in this video to make it quicker and more efficient and i feel like that is the best way to read

research papers effectively in this video i've just talked about all of the tools and tricks that you can use to read research papers quick and effectively let me know in the comments

if you know of any other tools that can help people or any other tricks and tips that you've got for really kind of speeding up the process which can be

incredibly long incredibly boring and it's all about getting through those things quickly the research papers read them effectively let the interesting ones bubble up to the surface and then

those are the ones you should spend more time on and that is probably the most effective way to read and then looking at the title abstract then the figures

and tables the captions then the conclusions then the discussion and results and very last the methods that is how you read a research paper and save yourself a ton of time

if this video has been useful to you please go check out academiainsider.com there you'll find my ebook the ultimate academic writing toolkit where i go through everything you need to know

about writing peer-reviewed papers effectively and quickly and it's very much related to reading so go check it out and also you can join my forum my community where there's a bunch of

really awesome academics helping each other get better solve problems because academia can be lonely and confusing and that community is growing quickly and

together we can help each other you