Literature

Managing and staying up-to-date on literature is an important part of doing research. In the group we have discussed our preferences, here you can find an overview of useful tools.

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Searching

There are many tools and websites available for searching literature, however, we quickly came to a consensus on our favourites.

• Google Scholar - Usually the first step for searching relevant papers with keywords
• PubMed - More advanced biomedical literature search
• Connected Papers - Easily find similar papers to your initial reference paper and create a visual overview

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Storing

Having a good reference manager is essential for keeping an overview of your relevant literature, especially during the process of writing a paper or proposal. Each manager has their own pros and cons, but eventually the choice comes down to your own preference. Most reference managers offer a Word plugin to facilitate citations, this is highly recommended.

• Mendeley - Allows highlighting in the imported PDF files and making notes, extracts citation information from PDFs well
• Zotero - Extracts citation information from webpages well, but offers limited cloud storage
• ReadCube Papers - Advanced PDF viewing, but only PDFs can be imported

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Updating

Although being aware of new research in your area is vital, the methods for doing so are probably the least structured. Here are a few examples to get you started.

• “Cited by” - Search using this button on your relevant papers, for example using Google Scholar
• Social media: Twitter, LinkedIn, Slack - This is more relevant than I myself expected, particularly useful for staying up-to-date passively
• PubMed - Subscribe to particular keywords and get updates by email (can also be applied to other search engines)
• Connected Papers - The colour in the graph clearly indicates new work, the ‘derivative works’ button is particularly useful for this purpose
• ResearchGate - Particularly useful for following the work of specific authors
• Read by QxMD - Personalized digital journal: provides a single place to keep up with new research, read topic reviews and search PubMed
• Recommendations from your reference manager - May be useful to some degree