Freshmen don't have such high requirements for papers, just read them, and learn the ability of literature retrieval at most (the simplest ones are Baidu and Google, but the papers above are generally few and old, and the libraries of general schools have the right to browse and download the websites of papers, so just go there and have a look, such as China HowNet and Science).

Generally, you don't read the whole book at first, but all you read are related papers. For example, your thesis is about the treatment method of high-iron manganese mine well water. You can search for articles with mine water, groundwater, high-iron manganese and treatment method as keywords, and the conditions can be relaxed at the beginning. After finding an article with a similar direction to your thesis, you can also look at the references of the article, which are generally related to your thesis direction and can also be used as references of your thesis, and the references are directly quoted at the end.

Finally, when writing a paper, you must refer to relevant literature, because at the end of your paper, you have to write what you refer to, unless the direction of your paper is brand-new and no one is involved, but that is basically impossible.

PS: Personally, I think it is very difficult to write a thesis, because I didn't take any specialized courses in my freshman year!