How Many Articles Per Day Do People Read
Read i paper each day for one twelvemonth. Proceed, I dare you!
TL;DR Yes, keeping upwardly with the literature is similar shaving a jellyfish, but this challenge will definitely assist!
The claiming was to read at least 1 scientific article everyday for an entire year, a New Years resolution whose accomplishment was doubted by anyone I told. Well, it'southward been a year since I started, and I tin at present say to all the nay-sayers, the no-chancers, the that's-impossibles, the rather-yous-than-mes, and the eye-rollers: you were right. Well, half right. I vicious shy of 365 by 100, but 265 is roughly equivalent to reading a paper every working day of 2019. I'm happy with that!
Groundwork
The guilt of non reading was getting me down, really downwardly. My grasp of the literature in my area (non-invasive brain stimulation) stagnated subsequently my PhD, and the staggeringly loftier publication rate meant it wasn't long before I was too far behind to bother trying to catch upwardly. As for learning almost a new inquiry field, forget it; I was a new mail-doc and I didn't have the fourth dimension. In addition, my ambition for scientific discipline was waning in the face of the credibility crunch.
In short, my lack of reading fabricated me feel ignorant and guilty, whcih was accompanied by disillusionment. It as well starved my writing brain, which I found out needs continual input from authors with inventive ways to codify ideas into words.
This state of affairs really rankled when I discovered that my main source of data was YouTube and what others told me in person. There is nothing wrong with this, merely it strook me every bit very anti nullius in verba ("take nobody'due south word for it"); the closest affair we accept to a Hippocratic oath in science.
What inverse?
In January 2019, I realised this situation was unsustainable. Yep, I am never going to master a field of knowledge, the ballooning quantity of papers prevents this. And, yep, the integrity of science is in a bad way at the moment. But, this shouldn't put me off reading, for God sake!
Effectually this fourth dimension, I was watching a YouTube video (natch) of Christopher Hitchens, in which he says (at i.26 mins):
I want to live my life taking the risk all the fourth dimension that I don't know anything similar enough yet; that I haven't understood plenty; that I can't know enough; that I'thou always hungrily operating on the margins of a potentially great harvest of time to come cognition and wisdom. I wouldn't have it any other manner.
This reminded me that the deed of learning is what is of value, non mastering the literature.
At the aforementioned time, I was driving downwards to Cumberland Guild to attend the Reproducible Workshop, organised by the United kingdom Reproducibility Network. This was a six-day retreat in which a lucky xxx or and so early career researchers received workshops and lessons on reproducible research practices by some of the worlds leading experts. The mission of the worshop was to disseminate best practise with the view of making research as reproducible, transparent and robust as possible — all central components of scientific integrity. In a word, Heaven.
It was here, on the 7th Jan that I started the #PaperPerDayChallenge.
Why should y'all do this challenge?
Reading a newspaper each day was one of the least regretful, most enjoyable things I have e'er done. Reading faster, gaining confidence as a writer, making meaningful contributions to projects and forming collaborations are a few examples of the many benefits of doing this claiming. Here are my elevation picks:
1 Starting an Open Research Initiative. Given my reservations nigh scientific standards, I decided to focus my reading on meta-research. I am certain that without the knowledge base I built doing this challenge, I would not have been able to pursue two of my most proudest achievements: The RIOT Science Guild and the Male monarch'southward Open up Research Grouping Initative (KORGI).
These initiatives aim to engender scientific rigour at King's College London, and it was the newspaper challenge that helped me weather the storm and get people on side. These initiatives are now making important in roads into guiding researchers and the institution towards reproducible research practices.
If you lot want to offset up your own initiative, delight read this to get started:
two Importance of conciseness. Given that i-60 minutes is the average time spent reading an article (Tenopir, Christian & Kaufman, 2019), brevity is important. Everyone is told this in every writing form. But, the focus has been on trimming words, not arguments.
Commentaries and counter-commentaries illustrated to me the power of arguments and language if articulated economically. Invariably, two or three points in three pages could do the work of an ballsy forty pager, with the addition that the quondam leaves a greater impression and is more than likely to go circulated. For a swell demonstration of this, cheque out papers #77 to #82 and #101:
3 Emboldening myself to write. There is a lot of repetition out in that location (due east.g., Burdine, de Castro Maymone & Vashi, 2019) and prose are oft impenetrable (e.g., Plavén-Sigray, Matheson, Schiffler & Thompson, 2017)*. Seeing this knocked dead a few anxieties I have about the originality of my thinking and the quality of my writing, which gave me the conviction to write. I now find that words come up much more than easily.
Other things I learned forth the way
Keeping upwardly with the literature these days is unfeasible. 25 one thousand thousand papers were published between 1996 and 2011, by 15 million scientists. In talking to people, I noticed that like me in that location is a narrow space of fourth dimension ane has between work commitments and personal life, and this is not plenty to fill up with reading. Instead, fourth dimension is spent on data drove, writing and admin, which is oftentimes subsidised with time ameliorate spent on family, friends or recuperation.
This experience is non unique to me. In a recent article, Ben Bleasdale at the Wellcome Trust wrote:
A career in research offers many fulfilling features, but it can also take a personal cost. The level of 'burn out' amongst academics(opens in a new tab) is at present comparable with 'high-gamble' occupations such as healthcare professionals, with younger people particularly at run a risk. Partly fuelled by the power dynamics inside research teams, bullying and harassment is widespread and tolerated — surveys advise that 25–35% of academics take been bullied in the workplace in the past year, compared to 10–14% of the general population.
In a recent open consultation(opens in a new tab) we shared via our network, 722 PhD supervisors (45%) said they had noticed increasing cases of mental health problems among PhD students. Our data indicates(opens in a new tab) that while most PhD students remain satisfied with their work-life balance, satisfaction levels appear to have been failing for many years.
Read this too:
How might this impact reading? In role of a contempo survey about scholarly reading habits (Tenopir et al., 2019), 377 scientists answered questions about the terminal scientific article they read. On average, only a third were read in great care in full, almost a third were re-readings, and the younger the respondent the more time spent reading each article (roughly, group average = 60mins; below xxx-years = 85 mins; above lx years = 45 mins).
Together, this information paints a moving picture of an overburdened workforce, with ECRs in particular simply unable to digest information fairly, presumably because of lack of fourth dimension.
Notwithstanding, speaking with my science hat on, I practice not want to make any strong causal inference here. Its a big ask to expect a majority of papers to exist read in their entirety; plus, papers exercise become re-read; and, ECRs are getting to grips with the literature and so take their time. This is all normal and acceptable.
Nonetheless, a connexion between workload and the inability to read is one I am happy to make. This is beacuse during my challange, I spoke to a lot of people, and time and fourth dimension again the response was: I have no time to read. Sadly, a portion said they often read papers simply to find back up for their (or their supervisor's) viewpoint in a paper they're writing, sometimes they were forced to do this. A majority said they do effort to read, but this is in the service of a newspaper or grant. Very few read for other reasons, such as to broaden their knowledge base outside their domain of expertise.
You should accept up the challenge!
I read 265 papers, in total. Yes, time commitments are an unignorable barrier to reading, only if my lazy arse did information technology you can too. Every bit I said at the showtime, a major barrier was the will to read, not just time. So, to assistance, I've compiled a listing of helpful tips along with incentives.
1 Make yourself answerable. If no i knows if y'all fail, you volition fail. That is my motto anyhow. Then, I made myself accountable by posting the articles I read in a Twitter thread. Thus, if I got flakey, people would see and I couldn't live with the shame if I bailed:
2 It makes keeping up with the literature routine! By making myself accountable, information technology forced me to commit to this claiming. This resulted in two things.
Outset, I had to find time to read. It wasn't easy, and I naively thought I could allocate a time of day in which to read. What really happened was that I got in the habit of reading whenever I could, considering I never knew when I would go a gap in my day again. This for me was the secret to succeeding in this challenge and is at present part of my routine e'er.
Second, because of the aformentioned repeition and readability issues, I establish I spent a proportion of my time trying to find papers I wanted to (or could) read or ones that I could read in the time I had. I used the conventional routes — eastward.g., databases etc — to begin with, simply concluded upwardly relying on Twitter (I suggest following @danquintana, @lakens, @deevybee, @annemscheel, and @BrianNosek, @LisaDeBruine, @StuartJRitchie and @sTeamTraen), PsyArXiv, bioRxiv, and Nature News.
3 Twitter threads! I cannot oversell the importance of Twitter threads. They improved my comprehension, and led to me finding other papers which were invariably better than ones I had actively searched for.
4 Twitter spats are very important. More important than anything else, Twitter threads showed me how frail arguments are even in the minds of expects. In the grit and heat of a Twitter row about a contempo paper, y'all can see in quick succession arguments rise and autumn. This is a huge conviction building do and an important lesson in how to quickly fashion an argument.
See the thread in response to this Tweet for an example:
5 Doing a public skilful. A happy unintended outcome is that my thread turned into a reading list for anyone interested in meta-enquiry.
In fact, in Open Research, a crowd sourced reading list has been compiled by Dan Simons and Brent Roberts, which tin can constitute here.
six Doing more work for other people, at no cost to you. I had planned to write an annotated reading list of papers based on the papers I have read in my claiming, but people much brighter and better informed than me did a meliorate job. For anyone interested in Reproducibility, please read:
If yous would like to make an annotated reading listing, the #paperperdaychallenge is the perfect start to do this! You never know, you could get a published paper out of it…
seven Increase social media profile. At the starting time of 2019, I had about 200 followers, now I take simply over 1,000. This was a effect of tagging authors into Tweets, and they responded with a retweet and a follow.
8 Read commentaries on tough days. I don't want to bang on about the usefulness of commentaries, but you can read about 4 or v in an hour in full.
9 You tin be lazy. Rules in this challenge are made to curve. I went days without reading, simply read 4 or five papers in a flare-up. And then, I read a paper each twenty-four hours: on average. Also, papers don't accept to be peer-reviewed, they can be preprints, newspaper articles, blogs, etc. The point of the challenge remeber was to cleave out time to read, and reading something is better than naught.
10 Importantly, fulfilment. I have learned that a growing backlog of unfinished jobs gradually causes me anxiety and gets me down (very down). In fact, if you follow my Twitter thread, you will run into I dropped off in June, and was sporadic until November. I accept remainder problems at present. This is because I hitting a bad patch work-wise, and wanted to requite up because I had then much stuff to do and wasn't personally fulfilled. Piece of work piled up, compounding the situation.
Even so, whenever I could, I would read a paper, and felt that lilliputian bit better for having done soemthing — withal small — in full. Information technology was a little heave that I never knew I needed. It was made all the more rewarding because of the encouragement in person and on Twitter.
The biggest compliment was inspiring others, something which I establish — and notwithstanding discover — deeply flattering and warming:
Conclusion
I stopped the claiming before it was exactly a yr, opting instead to spend fourth dimension away from work. I had reached my quota, so there was no reason to continue. Practise I miss information technology? Sometimes, no. The challenge was a claiming, and some days you only don't desire to read and the guilt for non reading can be grating. But, I have to say, I'm itching to read once more. I encourage anyone charitable enough to read my blog to take up the claiming, you lot won't regret information technology!
*To be fair, I did focus on meta-research and I am a scrap thick, and so repetition and poor comprehension are to be expected.
References
Burdine, 50. K., de Castro Maymone, M. B., & Vashi, N. A. (2019). Text recycling: Self-plagiarism in scientific writing. International journal of women'southward dermatology, 5(2), 134–136.
Plavén-Sigray, P., Matheson, Thousand. J., Schiffler, B. C., & Thompson, Westward. H. (2017). The readability of scientific texts is decreasing over time. Elife, half dozen, e27725.
Tenopir, C., Christian, L., & Kaufman, J. (2019). Seeking, Reading, and Utilize of Scholarly Articles: An International Written report of Perceptions and Beliefs of Researchers. Publications, 7(1), xviii.
griffinsamesessuld.blogspot.com
Source: https://medium.com/@samuelwestwood/read-one-paper-each-day-for-one-year-go-on-i-dare-you-989329d14c61
Post a Comment for "How Many Articles Per Day Do People Read"