How-to-keep-on-top-of-the-literature.md

+A [Twitter thread](https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1581348060302835713.html) by Mert R. Sabuncu (@mertrory). Reproduced here for preservation.
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+Some advice I give my graduate students about how to keep on top of the literature in their field. A 🧵: 
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+It’s good to have a dedicated time (1 hour/day?) for finding papers, adding them to your read pile and “processing” them. 
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+For finding papers, my go-to tool is Google scholar. I try keyword searches, following citations, and author-based searches. I will also add random papers I encounter, say on Twitter, to my stack. 
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+Each paper added to a stack will be prioritized based on a quick skim of the title and abstract (level 0 understanding). I recommend a 3-stage prioritization. High, medium, low. High, for instance, will indicate a paper that is super relevant to my project. 
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+You can aim to add and categorize ~10 papers a day. That should not take more than 10 minutes. Next, you move on to level 1 processing of your stack, starting from high priority papers. This level of processing should take about 10 minutes per paper and yield … 
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+a basic understanding of the algorithm/model, problem, and data. The inputs and outputs, some modeling details, the literature context (what gap is being filled) will be part of this understanding. You can aim to process ~3 papers/day at this level. 
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+I recommend taking notes for level 1 processing: 3-4 sentences per paper and linking these to pdf and paper stack. Next up is level 2 processing, which can take 1-2 hours per paper. You can aim to do ~2-3 papers a week at this level, dedicating maybe 30 min/day to this task. 
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+You can only decide if a paper should be level 2, after processing it at level 1 and based on how relevant/important it is for your project. Level 2 processing should lead to a good understanding of the theoretical and empirical details, and results. 
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+Finally we have level 3 processing, where the aim can be replication or baselining. This entails an understanding that allows implementing the algorithm, deriving the theoretical results, and achieving the empirical results. You can probably do 1-2 of these a month… 
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+And the time you spend on this beyond the level 2 understanding can be considered as part of your research time (so not just literature review). 
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+For a given project (paper), you might need to process 100s of papers at level 1, dozens of papers at level 2, and 5-10 at level 3. 
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+These recommendations and estimates are all subject and project-specific of course and should only be considered as rough guidelines. Moreover, it does not consider the broad reading that one should also pursue during their PhD and beyond. 
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+That said, I strongly recommend having a system for processing the literature at a steady pace and not simply reactively. This habit can save a lot headache and improve the quality of your work. 
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+Fin.