Staying up to date on research and literature searches

The rate of publications keeps increasing every year, and it is now becoming difficult or impossible to keep pace with all the latest developments in any given field. Here are the main tools I use:

• Set up e-mail alerts for new publications from the main players in your field (I do this through Google Scholar, but there are other methods).

• Use article recommendation services to help you find articles you missed from the above alerts from time to time. I prefer Google Scholar’s recommended articles feature - they are usually spot-on for me.

• Reference management softwares like Mendeley and Zotero have their chrome extensions, which can help to download and classify the new papers into the corresponding folders by just one click.

If you are new to a field, one way to try to get caught up is to find a review article and work your way through that. Hopefully, the review will cite some articles that you can follow up on, and those articles will in turn cite other articles that look interesting to follow up on. If not, try a different review article as a seed. You can also do a reverse search, i.e., see what articles have cited a particular article (e.g., use the “Cited by” featured in Google Scholar). Once you’ve read through a dozen or so articles, you should start to have a pretty decent grasp of the main works and ideas in the field.

There are also more formal resources and databases for doing literature and data searches. I would highly recommend look at the “Materials Science” resources listed by the LBNL library: http://bit.ly/2HCePDQ