In this article, resident blogger Beth Price shares her top tips on how to read research papers effectively, prepare for your literature review, and not freak out. 

By the time you sign up for any post-graduate study, let alone a PhD, you will have read so many papers and cited so many books that you could call yourself an expert. And yet, so many of us still feel unsure about our own process of reading. 

If you’re anything like me, you set out to work through your reading list with the best intentions and brand-new stationery only to find yourself highlighting every other line, making either too many or not enough notes, and not getting the most out of your time. We’re all busy, with too much to read, let alone too much to do, so it’s time to figure out how to read academic papers, and save yourself time and stress.

You might be thinking that you know all of this and you nailed reading lists back in undergrad. If this is you, then I’m thrilled on your behalf. But for the rest of us, doing a PhD is nothing if not humbling, and sometimes the best thing to do is to go back to basics. 

Too Many Things to Read?

We’ve all heard the advice to “skim everything” and then, at some indeterminate point in the future, come back and read it again in more depth. I vividly recall an undergrad tutor earnestly recommending that we read everything at least three times. Once to skim and get the jist, once to make notes, and a final time to decide how useful the article was for our argument. 

This was clearly terrible advice. 

Most PhD theses will have literally hundreds of references. If we read each reference from cover to cover three times, we would still be on introductory reading well into our fourth year. Instead, triage your reading list.

Skimming everything by looking at just the abstract (if there is one), the introduction, and the conclusion helps give you a sense of the paper. But abstracts are not compulsory in most arts & humanities journals, don’t appear in most book chapters, and are so limited by word-count anyway, so we often end up missing the key information from an article by doing this. 

Instead, treating your reading list like a list of angry patients and triaging them is the way to go. Work your way down your list and group the readings by order of importance. Which ones do you need to focus on and read in more depth, and which ones can you skim for the main argument? Literally rank them, and then decide where to start. Some of the metrics I use to decide how to rank my reading list are below:

In Depth	Mid – thorough	Skim
Recommended by supervisor	Abstract seems relevant	Informational only
Core theory text for methodology	Cited in multiple other texts	Came up on database search against one search term
Direct argument I plan to counter / contribute to	Want to identify argument(s)	Have read previously, need to refresh

Too Many Notes to Handle? 

Whether you’ve gone too hard with the highlighter, or have ended up (as we all do) with pages and pages of notes to plough through, it is easy to end up overwhelmed. Unless you are enviably well-organised, you will inevitably have to spend time fixing your own note-taking habits at some point down the line. Top tip, do this sooner rather than later – it is much less frustrating to spend a couple of hours checking your bibliography in your first year than as you’re trying to write up!

One of the most useful tools for keeping track of your readings and for beginning a literature review is keeping an annotated bibliography on the go. Whether you prefer to make paragraph notes or make a table in Excel (other programmes are, of course, available), maintaining an annotated bibliography will save you time and stress in the long run. 

Source	Author	Summary	Evaluation	Reflection
	Who is the author? What is their field? Which institute (if any) are they based at? Are there any obvious motivations behind this piece?	100 – 150 words (ish) summarising the piece. What methods are used? What evidence is considered? What is their main argument?	Is the main argument convincing? How does it interact with other literature? Is there something obvious missing / have they ignored evidence?	How does this serve my research? Is it helpful? Where does it fit in my thesis – core methodology / complementary argument etc.? What questions does it prompt?

Briefly summarising and, most importantly, evaluating what you have read as you go means that you don’t have to rely on manually searching endless pages of notes when you come to writing. It also gives you a good starting point for writing the dreaded literature review, because you will have already identified gaps in the scholarship, flaws in research methods, and common arguments. 

Most importantly, try it and see if it works for you. If it doesn’t, don’t do it! 

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For more reading & note-taking tips, I recommend:

• Raul Pacheco-Vega’s website 
• Cornell University’s mini-module on the Cornell Note Taking System

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