Read One Paper a Day: Keeping up with Academic Literature

Written with Jordan Wirfs-Brock

A stack of books and papers.

Like other PhD students, we were consumed by our guilt of not reading enough. So, we started a daily reading project! We made a pact to read one research article everyday and summarize it on a shared document. We also added interesting quotes, relevant references, thoughts on how it connects to our research, and reflections on our emotions about this reading project.

We quickly learned that summarizing our reading was helpful to retain information. Although we began excitedly, we often felt overwhelmed by the pile of “follow-up” references for each article. More than often, we felt happy and inspired when we found helpful information for our research.

Reading one paper a day can be pretty tough. As the semester progressed, graduate school priorities like classes, teaching, and doing research caught up to us. We progressed to reading a paper once in a few days. This often made us frustrated. Sometimes, we would read papers and forget to update the document, because we would write notes on physical paper.

We decided to be kind on ourselves. We realized that it’s okay to skip a few days as long as we’re reading regularly. In spite of its highs and lows, we find the project to be extremely helpful in deeply understanding literature.

If you want to take on this project , we recommend the following prompts for your summary:

1. Title: paper’s title
2. Link to Paper: include link to paper
3. Full Citation: whatever format you follow
4. Brief Summary: a short summary of the article
5. Interesting Quotes and Reflection: a list of quotes, including reflections and questions about each one
6. Related References: a list of references you need to follow-up on
7. How this connects to your research? a few sentences on how this is relevant to your work
8. How are you feeling about the daily reading project? a few sentences on your thoughts and emotions
9. How long did it take? estimated time

We noticed a few practices that made it easier to keep up the regular reading habit.
(1) Having a list of “to read” items helped grease the wheels. Just as a blank page can be terrifying, so can a blank reading list. The “related references” prompt in our notes gave us somewhere to start each day and helped the habit perpetuate itself.
(2) Streaks can be motivating (when you want to maintain them) or demotivating (once you’ve fallen off the wagon, it’s easy to stay off). An accountability buddy can help buffer this demotivating effect. Seeing that the other person was sticking to the habit helped us when we faltered.

If you do try this project, let us know your thoughts!