Strategies for efficiently starting your literature research and reading journal articles

Overview: As you enter a research-based degree program, you will need to master the process of selecting, organizing, and effectively reading papers. It is a skill to thoughtfully engage with an article’s intentions, scope, assumptions, and analysis that unveils new knowledge for a community of practice.  We hope that the following post will help you as you either start exploring published literature or revisit your current practices to become more effective. 

 

Photo by David Clode on Unsplash

Post Contributor(s): Marian Kennedy and Dr. Sapna Sarupria, Associate Professor in the University of Minnesota Department of Chemistry. Professor Sarupria studies materials using computational methods (molecular modeling, simulations, and statistical mechanics) and won one of the coveted NSF CAREER awards in 2017.  Her research involves developing sampling techniques in molecular simulations and applying them in understanding long-standing problems in condensed matter.

 

Journal Peer Review and Revision and Publication! Oh My!

Overview: For a scientific community to grow its knowledge, individual researchers need to enter a conversation with the rest of this scientific community about their newest research results, the validity of those results, and how those results fit into the existing knowledge. The peer review of manuscripts by journals, the publication of accepted articles, and then the discussions of the articles by others (citations in articles by other researchers) is one way such dialog occurs. 

 

Photo by Steve Johnson on Unsplash

We hope that the following post will help you understand the role of journals and the peer-review process in our scientific communities. As we have better understood how research studies are reviewed for publication, we have improved our own writing and internal evaluations before article submissions.  This has led to a decrease in our own frustration and quicker progress toward publication.

 

Post Contributor(s): Marian Kennedy and Dr. Sapna Sarupria, Associate Professor in the University of Minnesota Department of Chemistry. Professor Sarupria studies materials using computational methods (molecular modeling, simulations, and statistical mechanics) and won one of the coveted NSF CAREER awards in 2017. Her research involves developing sampling techniques in molecular simulations and applying them in understanding long-standing problems in condensed matter.