How much should I be reading each week?

[katiegud]

I know that is a very general question, but I am completely at a loss. I'm in the UK, so my research is very much on my own, and I therefore don't know what to do. About how many articles do you all read each week? (I'm in my first year working on literature review, if you are wondering.)

[jujubea]

I don't know but your Puffin is adorable.

[Monochrome Spring]

My labmate and I aim for 4 papers each day. At 30 minutes each (assuming a more thorough skim), this should only take 2 hours. This is excluding papers assigned to us for courses, unless they are also very closely related to our research interests. If you read 4 papers every day, including weekends, you could have almost 30 each week, or about 120 per month.

 

Edit: I should clarify that this is for us to get more ideas about what we want to do our research in, as well as for general ideas about research in closely related fields. You don't need to thoroughly read every paper. Just get an idea of what they found or think is important.

[GeoDUDE!]

I think it depends on where you are in your literature review.

 

If you are in a field with many publications that do similar things, I'm not sure its necessary to read those papers as much as know about them. 

 

You want to find papers that provide motivation for your dissertation. The background "history" can come later, you want to be able to write maybe a 6 sentence paragraph that states a Hypothesis, a reason for that hypothesis, and what new this hypothesis brings to your subject (intellectual merit).

[TakeruK]

This is something I wonder about a bit too. It might be dependent on field or even specific research project. For my current project, I have a library of about 200 papers but I probably have only thoroughly read about 20 or so. In the paper that I am finishing up, I think I cite about 50-60 of these papers. For the ones I didn't thoroughly read, I just know what GeoDUDE! wrote above--i.e. their main result and how they got there. 

 

I find that when I start a new project I might read a bunch of key papers in the field. For example, several papers that set up the problem, then several that describe the method I'm using, and then one or two from each of the other methods that I am not using. That is usually enough for me to get started on analysis, writing code etc.

 

Then, I read more papers as I run into problems or need to know about specific things. I collect papers along the way, which is how I ended up building my 200+ paper collection on this project. I probably only had a dozen or so when I started doing science. Maybe it's just my field or my preference, but I generally start doing work first and read later (or as I get stuck).

 

It's also important to keep up to date on the field. I do this by scanning abstracts of newly posted papers on the arxiv.org database each day and read/skim the ones I find interesting. It goes in my library if I think I might cite it in the future. I also stay up to date by going to seminars and conferences. I make sure to keep an interest on fields outside of the one I'm working on too, with special interest on fields that my skills might directly relate to.

[music]

I'm probably reading about 15-20/week pretty thoroughly (1st year humanities student). It feels like a lot, and I'm not sure how much I'm digesting properly, but it's also a great way to get a feel for styles of writing which I like, and get a broad overview of my field in these early stages of grad school. I'm a slow reader, so it takes me maybe 4 hours from Mon-Fri to get through this.

[maelia8]

I read more books than articles, since I'm still in the coursework stage of my degree and don't have to do any independent research yet. I read only 5 (long, 20-30 page) articles independently per week, plus half a dozen shorter book reviews, but I read about 4 books per week (250-500 pages each). I also go to a working group where we read two articles per week based in my specialty area, and I go to colloquium talks where professors in my department present their research and papers about once a week. 

[Edge]

I aim to read 1 paper per day (1st year Engineering PhD).  I make a print out a cover sheet summarizing good points, lacking research, things i would want to reference, etc. and put all the electronic cover sheets in a single word document so I can search in one document for keywords I'm looking for.  I also have an excel spreadsheet of all the papers I've read, even the garbage ones I won't be using.

[Nerd_For_Life]

Depending on my workload I average 3 articles per day during a light week (reading 7 days a week; ~400-500 pages) and closer to 800-1000 pages a week on a heavier week (when I'm slogging through articles and books (~250 pgs per book). I am out of coursework working on my comprehensive exams so I have to read much more closely than I did during my coursework (when I was reading a higher volume of pages and retaining substantially less).

[starofdawn]

I aim to read 1 paper per day (1st year Engineering PhD).  I make a print out a cover sheet summarizing good points, lacking research, things i would want to reference, etc. and put all the electronic cover sheets in a single word document so I can search in one document for keywords I'm looking for.  I also have an excel spreadsheet of all the papers I've read, even the garbage ones I won't be using.

Fantastic idea... I should do this.