
Ask HN: How do you scale up your scientific reading? - stepnovij
Everyone knows that the number of publications is growing every year, this is especially noticeable in biology. I&#x27;m wondering how other cope with this volume. Is it possible to scale up reading articles?
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impendia
In my opinion (professional mathematician), one shouldn't try to scale up.

A generation ago, there were a hundred times as many articles as anyone could
read. Now, there are a thousand times as many. (In 2018, there were 33,486
mathematics papers published to the arXiv. [1])

I believe that the best strategy remains the same: simply pick what you do
want to read, and read it.

[1]
[https://arxiv.org/help/stats/2018_by_area](https://arxiv.org/help/stats/2018_by_area)

~~~
atrettel
I agree completely. There always has been too much to read, and the best
strategy remains to read what you can while recognizing that you may be
missing something. I make every effort to find as much related literature as
possible but I am continually amazed by some of the work that I find years
afterwards that I missed the first time around.

On a similar note, I remember reading a biography of physicist Lev Landau
years ago (Dorozynski's The Man They Wouldn't Let Die). If I recall correctly
--- and please correct if I am wrong --- there was a part where the author
described Landau's intentional reluctance to read papers, at least early on in
the research process. Landau wanted to formulate original approaches to
problems, so he did not want his thinking influenced by how things were
previously done. I do not agree with the idea but I do find it interesting
that some researchers in the past have valued the opposite of reading widely.

~~~
impendia
My postdoctoral mentor didn't go that far. But he did say that when he read a
book, and encountered the statement of some lemma or theorem, he liked to try
to figure out how to prove it himself instead of reading the proof there.

There is also the infamous "exercise" in Serge Lang's algebra book (scroll to
the bottom):

[https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B_pEp00B111JYWU1NmY4MjktZTN...](https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B_pEp00B111JYWU1NmY4MjktZTNmMS00MDE4LTkxMjQtYzQ4NWIxZjc3ZGY3/view?hl=en)

~~~
atrettel
I think your mentor strikes the right balance between awareness and
originality. My criticism of Landau's idea is that it's a great way to make
you think you have an original idea when you actually don't. Only a detailed
literature search will verify its originality. I think that any attempt to
"isolate" your thinking from others' thinking will fail because you cannot
live in a total vacuum. At least some external thinking will influence you no
matter what and we must acknowledge that. "Multiple independent discovery"
happens all the time in science, and it's because everyone tends to operate in
a similar environment.

I do agree with Landau that occasionally knowing how things are previously
done could limit how you approach the problem, but that can be fixed by
systematically reproducing or falsifying the previous results and drawing your
own conclusions (trust but verify). You gotta get your hands dirty. It's slow
and difficult but the right way in the long term.

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Jugurtha
Maybe it's curating that ought to be scaled. Most articles are a crappy
product of a system where quantitative indicators are set, but qualitative
indicators are forgotten.

~~~
stepnovij
You won't know if it's crap or not until you read it.

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DrNuke
Skim, do not read... if the work seems relevant to your interests and the best
practices are followed, have a look at the conclusions. If still interested,
have a look at the paper credentials, if it is peer-reviewed, from reliable
publisher, etc. Pretty any good researcher out there has been peer-reviewed at
least once in his career, be it a conference or a journal, so you can safely
ignore vanity press, complete outliers and fully independent proponents.

