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How do graduate students read the literature and determine their own research fields?
Many times we are trapped in the laboratory with the door closed, so it is better to spend some time reading the literature to see if others are equally confused. Our big boss said that there is no other way to succeed except reading, reading and reading a lot of documents, especially foreign documents. 1. Read literature sources and research databases, and study literature databases and professional databases in depth. Important things such as ISI, Medline, Ncbi, etc. Adding databases to favorites varies from person to person. Understand the colleges and universities related to their own research direction, pay close attention to the papers published by top group in this research field and direction and study them carefully. For international leaders and laboratories in this field, we should spend more time studying their homepages. You can order the reminders you are interested in for free on Google. It is updated 24 hours a day and will send you articles on this topic on the Internet. Always surf the Internet to see the latest information, which may inspire you for a while. It is still very important to read several articles about Cell, Nature and Science. Don't think that you don't care if it has nothing to do with your major. In fact, many methods and ideas in the field of biomedicine are interlinked at present, and the latest methods in the fields of nature and science can be used in your own field. For the key magazines in your field (No.1) (each volume has many readable summaries), it is very important to pay attention to the albums and supplements of the core journals in your field! ), you should read every article in each issue and then focus on reading. If you don't have that much time, at least the title &; The abstract should be. 1) Undetermined topic: I admire Professor Pu's point of view. Reading literature starts with textbooks-find the questions that interest you most and look for relevant comments. You will find some so-called mature ideas in the book, all of which are "guesses" in the comments, and then look for the original documents. You will find that a lot of experimental evidence is a preliminary exploration when the conditions were not enough at that time. If you find such a problem that a popular viewpoint has not been verified by the latest technology, you can verify it, and there will be two results: ① Yes, then you have verified a very correct viewpoint with the latest technology and provided him with new evidence, which is a good job; In addition, if you find that the previous viewpoint is wrong, then you can find a future research direction, continue to do it and get it! 2) The topic has been decided: the first thing to do is to find a review article written by an authoritative person in the relevant research field in an authoritative magazine. This kind of article is informative and incisive. After reading it, it will not only help us grasp the focus and focus of related research, but also help us grasp the general direction and framework of the research field, who, which university or research institute, which direction is stronger, and so on. Secondly, read the abstracts extensively and choose the most relevant ones for intensive reading. It is very important to take notes and mark at the same time during intensive reading, because a good article may have different gains every time you read it, and it will be very helpful to sum up your notes and experiences every time; Third, the paper is widely read and skipped according to different needs. Get involved in some fields that have something to do with the major but are quite far away. The general procedure for me to learn relevant documents is: 1. After reading the Chinese books that have introduced this field a lot (the materials are generally old, and if they are new books, the main research contents and achievements in the last five years to 10 will be collected), you can have a comprehensive understanding of the development history and recent situation of this field, and some special terms and English words also have concepts. 3, according to the above study to master the professional vocabulary, name, journal name check foreign literature. My experience is that if that field is far from the original major, you can't find anything good when you look up foreign literature, especially some keywords are often inferred, which leads to poor retrieval results. I think if you are not familiar with what you want to study, such as a certain disease, you should first look through the Chinese textbooks and have a general understanding of this disease, which will be very helpful when reading the literature in the future. Then, look up some Chinese abstracts of topics your boss or you want to do online, which is a supplement to the textbook content. At the same time, it also makes it possible for you to get in touch with the forefront of this field in China. At this time, you can start to read some foreign language reviews and look at the research situation and progress abroad. Maybe at this time, you will have a better understanding of what you want to learn. Next, you can read some foreign original works, which will tell you how to complete your research topic. You can start your project when the amount of literature has accumulated to a certain extent. But don't forget, always pay attention to the research progress of the related content you are studying, which may give you new supplements. Finally, read the literature, number it and take notes. For a discipline that is not familiar with the field, first find the relevant summary. Summary is the fastest way to understand the field, because the teaching materials are lagging behind and the works are focused on a certain point. Excellent comments can be read as teaching materials. The order of reading documents is of course from Chinese to foreign languages. After all, Chinese is its mother tongue, which is easy to understand and have a sense of accomplishment. The content of the article is from summary to discussion. It usually takes an hour or two to consult a pile of documents, sort out their abstracts first, and even print them out. According to the abstract, you can make a preliminary judgment on what you want. Then go online to find the full text. If you can't find it, go to the library. If you can't find it, email it to your foreign classmates, and you can usually get it. For questions of interest, we should not only read the original text, but also read the references. Generally, you will catch up on a few articles and have a general understanding of the problems you want to know. In the process of reading the article, of course, we should take some notes, build a word document and do some copying work. The advantage of this is that you don't have to spend a lot of time looking for your arguments or arguments in the future. Take notes while reading the article. Reading notes can be classified and extracted according to different contents, such as progress, research methods, experimental methods, research results and so on. , you can add your own comments. Summarize your notes regularly (summarize what you have done in the past-be aware of it; How far have you come now-know yourself and know yourself; Discover the strengths and weaknesses of others. Predict the future hot spots and development direction-find your own direction and goal in order to attack accurately! )。 We should focus on sending our results to SCI, so we should mark some classic sentences selectively and write them down. In addition, sometimes the thoughts that come to mind and the thoughts that pass by will be recorded and checked at any time. Maybe after a long time, you will naturally have a new view. Thinking hard is not only to understand what others have done, but also to consider what others have not done, or whether his experiment can be consistent with his conclusion, whether the data can be unreliable and so on. Draw the author's whole logic with a chart, scrutinize it one by one, and think selectively. Look at the literature critically, don't blindly worship, some things are made by yourself, not like this. You have to do it yourself, but you have to use your head. Look at the literature and know how to grasp the key points and find ideas. Mainly to learn other people's ideas. That is to say, I read the literature and ask a few questions. Where is the technical breakthrough of the article? For example, many patents talk about many separation methods. The key is not to look at what it does first, but to think about what is the basis of this separation method, why people think of this method, and whether there are other physical properties that can be used as the basis for separation. Communicating with others is an excellent way to improve yourself. Talk to your tutor about your ideas and exchange knowledge about the research progress in a certain direction in your field; Talking with the cattle people in the relevant direction is much more enlightening than reading the literature. Not only do you talk to people in this field, but you also seize the opportunity to talk to people in other fields. Sometimes you can't understand a word of a person who has studied for half a year. Especially the awesome people in other fields, he may give you a golden idea, especially in China, where awesome people are generally not very conservative to outsiders. Collective discussion is very necessary. Find a few like-minded people together. Everyone has a copy of the document. Everyone reads different documents in different departments, and then everyone sits together. Speak in turn and discuss with each other. In this way, is the amount of literature increased by n power! ! ! Compare and read papers with opposite views. You can refer to them and taste the views of both sides. In addition, other expert comments and readers' questions published at the same time as the original work should be read together with the original work. By comparison, we can see our own gap. The most interesting thing about reading a paper is to find "one manuscript and two votes". I mean, many authors write the same scientific research data into different papers on similar topics, or have made new developments and changes on the basis of predecessors. At this time, if your subject matter is similar to this, your good luck will come. By comparing the similarities and differences of these articles, we can find out the different opinions and ideas of the authors (or research groups) on the same set of data, or find out the "real" methods that the authors want to hide. After analyzing the similar experiments of the same scientific research group, I quickly found the key reason for the failure of my experiment, and successfully completed the animal model making in a short time, laying the foundation for further experiments. Skilled workers should be good at comparison and discovery. In some high-tech documents, such as Chinese and English, it is impossible to report all the main points. For example, there are many samples in a patent, and each sample has different conditions or formulas. At this time, it is necessary to compare several similar documents and see where their similarities are. This should be noted in the pharmaceutical and surfactant industries. Comprehensive reference to foreign literature. It must be clear that there are some unreliable articles in foreign literature; Another phenomenon is that he will omit the key things about the key points, and sometimes he will not write some details. The problem is that everyone omits different points and details. You can find the context of their research and the key points of the problem from the comparison. Reading order of individual articles and key papers: 1. The main information and research background of the citation. 2. Chart to understand the main data and instructions. 3. Discussion and Conclusion Connect the chart with the conclusion, and judge whether the conclusion is appropriate according to the chart. 4. Results Read the results carefully to see how the data was obtained and how it was analyzed. 5. Materials and Methods Read the materials and experimental methods in detail to see how the experiment was conducted. 6. Discussion and results Further master the paper and pay attention to the discussion on how to explain the results obtained in this paper from known knowledge and research. In addition, for a large number of charts in the paper, when you can redraw this picture and explain it in your own language, it means that you understand it. The most important part of a paper is: chart, discussion, text result and method. At present, life science magazines have high requirements for charts. We must master the methods and results of the article only by reading charts and their explanatory texts, and then combine the readers' own original knowledge to know its meaning. This meets the requirement that modern people must master the most needed information in the shortest time. Therefore, after working in a certain field for a period of time, the articles obtained by formal novelty retrieval only need to look at abstracts and charts, and some involve new methods or breakthrough achievements, and then look at discussions, written achievements and methods. This also reminds us that when writing foreign language articles, we should pay attention to charts and their explanatory texts, so as to achieve visualization and maximize information. Your familiar field