handbook / Research Practices

Literature Study

Given the rapid increase in publications, it is often difficult to keep pace with the literature. This makes choosing what to read, and making the best use of the time allotted for reading, significantly important. Below are some tools and habits that can help you stay on top of your field without drowning in it.

Staying current

• Google Scholar alerts — Identify a handful of researchers working in your area of interest (they don’t need to be pioneers of the field, just people whose work you find interesting) and set up Google Scholar alerts for them. Be careful not to flood your inbox — alerts for 100 people will defeat the purpose. Ten to fifteen well-chosen names is usually plenty.

• AI tools — Beyond the standard chat models, several AI platforms are built specifically for literature discovery and review:

  • FutureHouse Platform — a suite of science-specific AI agents. Crow gives concise, citation-backed answers to specific questions; Falcon is built for deep, structured literature reviews across many papers; Owl checks whether something has already been done (“has anyone…”); Phoenix assists with chemistry planning. Falcon is a nice option for getting a broad first pass over a new sub-topic. Note: FutureHouse’s original agents are now offered through their Edison Scientific platform, so check current access/pricing there.
  • Elicit — good for structured extraction across many papers (e.g., pulling methods/results into a table).
  • Consensus — search engine that summarizes what the literature says on a specific claim/question.
  • Semantic Scholar — free, has a good “Semantic Reader” and citation-graph-based recommendations; useful even without AI features.

• Social media — Follow researchers of interest on platforms like LinkedIn, Bluesky, and X/Twitter (though it’s unclear whether Twitter still serves this purpose as well as it used to). Many researchers share their recent work there before or alongside formal publication.

• Special issues from journals of interest — Journals often publish dedicated special issues on specific topics, and these can be a great place to find some of the field’s best papers in one place. This applies to older special issues too, not just current ones.

• Follow the references — Some of the best papers you’ll ever find come from simply following the reference list of a paper you’re already reading. It’s a good habit to build, but try not to interrupt your reading flow of the original paper — note down interesting references and follow up afterward.

• Citation-graph tools — Connected Papers and Litmaps visualize how papers relate to each other (forward and backward citations), which is a fast way to map out a sub-field starting from one or two seed papers.

Recommended reading on how to read

• How to find the papers you need to read — and avoid the ones you don’t (Nature)
• Ten Simple Rules for Reading a Scientific Paper (PMC)

Effective collection and organization of papers

Use a reference manager to keep your library searchable, tagged, and synced across devices. This saves enormous time later when writing papers or searching for “that one paper I read months ago.”

• Zotero (recommended default) — free, open-source, browser plugin for one-click saving, strong citation-style (CSL) support, and good group-library features for sharing a reading list across the research group.
• Connected Papers / Litmaps — pair well with a reference manager for the discovery stage before you commit papers to your library.

*Feel free to share any papers you find intersting in the group Zulip’s channel. We will try to have area-wised discussion forums, so better to share in the corresponding thread.