In today's information age, literature is really a dime a dozen in Qian Qian. Reading marginal or even irrelevant articles is tantamount to wasting time. The first challenge for graduate students is to understand their own topics quickly and deeply. In addition to the superficial explanations of teachers and brothers and sisters, you still have to read the literature yourself to dig deeper. This is also beneficial, because in the later research, you can't expect the teacher to teach you how to advance every step of the subject. When you read a lot of literature and have a deep understanding of the subject, it is easy to think about the direction of progress and divergent thinking.

So, how to understand the subject through literature? I think at this stage, we should read the summary paper first, and try our best to speak Chinese (except those with excellent English). What can I learn from English literature full of technical terms when I am not familiar with Chinese names of subjects? The greatest advantage of this paper is its simple retrieval and wide coverage. Read a summary and a dozen short articles. Its search basically depends on a few keywords in the theme, which is very simple. After searching with keywords, select several articles with the highest relevance to read. These articles should be read intensively, not skimmed. For some technical terms related to the topic, we should search the corresponding English names in time to prepare for the next English summary. After reading several Chinese reviews and getting a general understanding of the topics, don't indulge in them, don't keep reading Chinese documents, and start reading English reviews. After all, SCI will be published in the future, and the summary papers in some high-quality journals are also in English, which is a necessary process.

I believe that after reading and accumulating the previous Chinese abstracts, the reading of English abstracts will become relatively simple, and proper nouns will no longer make us afraid. The search of English comments is the same as that of Chinese comments, which can be completed by keywords, and then you need to filter out the most relevant articles to read. It is worth noting that it is really important to select reviews from high-level journals with high impact factors, high citations and the latest time, or from top journals in the industry! In my experience, I have seen a summary in a low-level magazine before, in which even the basic principles and interrelationships were not clearly stated, and even the sentences were wrong. For beginners, when it is easiest to cultivate basic scientific literacy, accepting the wrong concept will not only be difficult to correct in the future, but will even have a bad influence on the whole scientific research career. There may be some small mistakes in high-level journals, but the basic knowledge will not go wrong and the credibility is high.

There should not be too many such articles. Five articles are enough to give you a deeper and broader understanding of your subject. Another advantage of reading English Review is to help you find relevant small papers, and then find other papers through the citations of these small papers. You don't even have to do a special search, and a series of related small papers will find you. It's simply beautiful! Another way to find relevant papers is through the author. It is simple and convenient to find the "big cows" in the subject-related fields and search their articles directly, even more accurate than searching for keywords. It is worth noting that high-level journals should also give priority when selecting articles, and low-level articles should be avoided as much as possible, unless they are extremely related to the theme, but they should also pay attention to reading with a critical eye.

2. Find the right literature and read on without wasting.

Through the study of various materials on the Internet and the accumulation of experience, I think reading a good document must go through the following three steps. The first step is to get this paper, first browse it as a whole, and see if the article is only related to the keywords you searched for, or really related to your topic, so as to make an impression first. In this process, what you need to do is to read the title, abstract, keywords, subheadings and conclusions of the article carefully. The specific content of the discussion can be roughly seen. This process takes about ten minutes, but it requires heart and thinking. Because after reading it, I need to review the main idea of this article, what did it do and ask myself, does this article have anything to do with my topic? Does it include knowledge related to my topic? What materials can this paper provide for my project development? Wait a minute. After these thoughts, you will know whether this article needs to be read.

When you think this document is useful and worth reading in depth, you should follow the second step. At this time, it is no longer simply reading, but learning with awe. Pay attention to the details and get to the point.

In the process of reading, we need to understand the chart first, find out why the author made this picture, what information this picture can convey, and then read it intensively in combination with the content. I used to look directly at the content and look at the chart for about half a minute. I couldn't really understand how the author discussed it, and even I couldn't figure out how some data were related, so that I forgot the front after reading it. Since I started to look at the pictures first, I found it easy to look at the content. Therefore, it can be said that the chart is the adhesive of the content of the article and deserves serious attention for the first time. Study the author's charts carefully, especially those exquisite ones. We can write down those outstanding and clear data expressions and imitate them when drawing later.

In the process of reading the content, you must always remember your own topic, connect the content of the article with the topic, and don't read it in isolation. Don't let go of the knowledge you don't understand, and check it quickly. Therefore, it may take time to read the literature in the early stage, sometimes it may take a day. But in this process, you will gradually learn a lot of knowledge related to the subject that this science can't. Just like snowballing, reading more documents will increase professional knowledge, and reading the following documents will become simple and time-saving.

Completing the second step is equivalent to reading the paper for the second time. At this point, do you think it is over? No. At this point, you need to do the third step. After intensive reading, it doesn't mean that this article will no longer appear in your field of vision, but they should always appear in your mind. But our memory is limited, and it is impossible to remember it after reading it, so we need to sort out these papers and not let them become "passers-by". We need to set up some folders to store documents in different categories, and pay attention to keeping reading traces (electronic yellow text, comments, etc. We need to take it out and continue reading when we are free or when the topic encounters bottlenecks in the future. Every time we read the literature, we will gain something, especially with the deepening of the subject. What we didn't know in the literature before may stimulate innovation by carefully tasting generate in the following reading. In addition, by rereading these documents, we will find some unsolved problems and provide some enlightenment for the development of the discipline.

After scientific research is on the right track, we should develop the good habit of reading documents every day, especially the latest published articles, and keep abreast of the latest trends of research. Don't fall behind in our own thinking or collide with others, which will lead to futility. In addition, reading more documents can also be inspired by the author's research and guide his own topic selection, which is particularly important for breaking the bottleneck period.