The academic world builds on research and research builds on papers. As a researcher in academia, you must find yourself overwhelmed by the huge pile of academic papers to read, cite, and keep track of. Handling large volumes of journals, conference notes, monographs, your work and more can be daunting, to say the least. The sheer volume of academic literature can put anyone in a damp mood, but it affects students and researchers more when they are just starting out.
Ways To Manage Large Volumes Of Academic Papers
There are many ways you can manage your stack of academic papers. Different methods are going to work out for everyone so making sure to give every way a good and fair chance is important for you to see what works out the best for you. Some ways you can manage your academic papers’ huge volumes are:
Organisation Is The Key To Your Problems
The first way and the most effective out of all is to organise your stack of papers by establishing a method for collecting and storing them. Some ways to do the same are as follows:
- Digitalise your work: When you are working in academia in today’s world, digitalisation can be as much your friend as you want it to be. Storing your work in a digital field and accessing other works digitally can save you multiple trips to the library and manually searching for every little detail.
- Update your work: Removing irrelevant papers, and information from your work is important when working as a researcher to produce the best and most relevant research results. Keeping your work regularly updated prevents you from divulging your topic and also reduces information overload from your work.
- Use PDFs: They are the best way of storing information without compromising the quality of the content. With software like Mendeley, EndNote, Paperpile and more the world of research is at your fingertips. You can annotate, highlight, search, refer, and more with these tools when you work with digital PDFs. With these tools, you can also create bibliographies, and organise your papers by author, topic, or keyword which is a lot of help when you are navigating through a pile of academic research. If you are worried about the storage space on your computer, you can always use online service tools like Adobe Acrobat to compress PDF online for you.
Read By Time Or Theme
Reading various topics parallel is going to confuse you and your research. When you select a way of reading, whether by the period of time or by the theme, you will be able to better connect with the papers and remember the information presented in them. Actively taking notes, highlighting main points, noting any questions and referencing them can help you save time and efficiently manage your stack of papers.
Use Citation Tools
There are various tools available on the internet which help you cite your work and format these citations. These tools end up saving you hours of manual skimming and make sure you get accurate citations in your work. Cross-checking with your active referencing can help you finalise your draft and ready it for submission.
Skimming/ Speed Reading Is Your Friend
If you like reading you might want to savour every sentence and read it with as much attention as your next sentence but when working with a high stack of academic papers speed reading is your friend. When working with research papers, skimming the introduction, abstracts, and conclusion can help you grasp the whole of the paper and determine its relevance to your work. afterwards, you can decide to delve deeper into it if you want.
Summarise The Work
Try and summarise everything you read with its key points and findings for future reference. It helps improve your understanding of the work you are connected with. Additionally, it helps give you a critical eye to evaluate the already existing research points and later do the same with your work.
Try To Collaborate As Much As You Can
When working with academic papers, sharing your work with fellow researchers and discussing it can help you find its blind spots and strengthen your research. It can help you identify the research paper that can fill in the gaps in your work from the large pile of already existing works for you.
Transforming such large piles of academic-related documents into a manageable stack of papers to sort through is an essential step towards becoming a professional in the field. Using the existing tools and services which aim to make your professional lives a little easier and end your struggles is important when navigating the world of academia. You can use online free tools like Adobe Acrobat to help you compress multiple PDFs to reduce your storage space or edit it according to your needs, and many more.
