If you are a scientist, odds are you should be reading the literature more. This might not be true in every case—one can certainly imagine someone who reads the literature too much and never does any actual work—but as a heuristic, my experience has been that most people would benefit from reading more than they do, and often much more. Despite the somewhat aggressive title, my hope in writing this is to encourage you to read the literature more: to make you excited about reading the literature, not to guilt you into it or provoke anxiety.
You should read the literature because you are a scientist, and your business is ideas. The literature is the vast, messy, primal chaos that contains centuries of scientific ideas. If you are an ideas worker, this is your raw material—this is what you work with. Not reading the literature as an ideas worker is like not going to new restaurants as a new chef, or not looking at other people’s art as an artist, or not listening to music as a composer. Maybe the rare person has an internal creativity so deep that they don’t need any external sources of inspiration, but I’m not sure I know anyone like that.
If you buy the concept of “domain arbitrage” I outlined last week, then reading the literature becomes doubly important for up-and-coming arbitrageurs. Not only do you need to stay on top of research in your own field, but you also need to keep an eye on other fields, to look for unexpected connections. It was only after months of reading physical chemistry papers about various IR spectroscopy techniques, with no direct goal in mind, that I realized I could use in situ IR to pin down the structure of ethereal HCl; simply reading organic chemistry papers would not have given me that insight.
If you don’t read the literature at all—like me, when I started undergrad—then you should start small. I usually recommend JACS to chemists. Just try to read every paper in your subfield in JACS for a few months; I began by trying to read every organic chemistry paper in JACS. At the beginning, probably only 10–20% will make sense. But if you push through and keep trying to make sense of things, eventually it will get easier. You’ll start to see the same experiments repeated, understand the structure of different types of papers, and even recognize certain turns of phrase. (This happened to me after about a year and a half of reading the literature.)
Reading more papers makes you a faster reader. Here’s Tyler Cowen on how he reads so quickly (not papers specifically, but still applicable):
The best way to read quickly is to read lots. And lots. And to have started a long time ago. Then maybe you know what is coming in the current book. Reading quickly is often, in a margin-relevant way, close to not reading much at all.
Note that when you add up the time costs of reading lots, quick readers don’t consume information as efficiently as you might think. They’ve chosen a path with high upfront costs and low marginal costs. "It took me 44 years to read this book" is not a bad answer to many questions about reading speed.
All of Tyler’s advice applies doubly to scientific writing, which is often jargon-filled and ordered in arcane ways. After 7ish years of reading the scientific literature, I can “skim” a JACS paper pretty quickly and determine what, if anything, is likely to be novel or interesting to me, which makes staying on top of the literature much easier than it used to be.
Once you are good with a single journal, you can expand to multiple journals. A good starting set for organic chemistry is JACS, Science, Nature, Nature Chemistry, and Angewandte. If you already know how to read papers quickly, it will not be very hard to read more and more papers. But expanding to new journals brings challenges: how do you keep up with all of them at once? Lots of people use an RSS feed to aggregate different journals—I use Feedly, as do several of my coworkers. (You can also get this blog on Feedly!)
I typically check Feedly many times a day on my phone; I can look at the TOC graphic, the abstract, and the title, and then if I like how the paper looks I’ll email it to myself. Every other day or so, I sit down at my computer with a cup of coffee and read through the papers I’ve emailed to myself. This is separate from my “pursuing ideas from my research”/”doing a literature dive for group meeting” way of reading the literature—this is just to keep up with all the cool stuff that I wouldn’t otherwise hear about.
(I also use Google Scholar Alerts to email me when new labs publish results—I have probably 20-30 labs set up this way, just to make sure I don’t miss results that might be important just because they’re not in a high-profile journal.)
Keeping track of papers you actually like and want to remember is another challenge. For the past two years, I’ve put the URLs into a Google Sheet, along with a one-sentence summary of the paper, which helps me look through my “most liked” papers when I want to find something. Sadly, I didn’t do this earlier, so I’m often tormented by papers I dimly remember but can no longer locate.
This obviously depends on what you’re doing, but I tend to think about literature results in three categories:
Category 1 basically covers the highest profile results (Science and Nature), and these days Twitter makes that pretty easy.
Category 2 covers things “in-field” or directly related to my projects—anything it would be somewhat embarrassing not to know about. For me, this means JACS, Angewandte, ACS Catalysis, Org. Lett., OPRD, Organometallics, J. Org. Chem., and Chem. Sci. (I also follow Chem. Rev. and Chem. Soc. Rev., because review articles are nice.)
Category 3 covers things that I am excited to learn about. Right now, that’s JCTC and J. Phys. Chem. A–C. In the past, that’s included ACS Chem. Bio., Nature Chem. Bio., and Inorganic Chemistry. (Writing this piece made me realize I should follow JCIM and J. Chem. Phys., so I just added them to Feedly.)
Reading the literature is—in the short term—pointless, sometimes frustrating, and just a waste of time. It’s rare that the article you read today will lead to an insight on the problem you’re currently facing! But the gains to knowledge compound over time, so spending time reading the literature today will make you a much better scientist in the long run.
Thanks to Ari Wagen and Joe Gair for reading drafts of this post.