Exploring The Reading Habits of Academics: a Q&A

On Wednesday 30 October, we hosted our second webinar: “Exploring The Reading Habits of Academics”. Hristina, Head of Marketing at Researcher was joined by Dr-Ing. Pablo Jimenez — Calvo (University of Paris Sud), Dr Yiannis Sarigiannis (University of Nicosia),
Dr Daisy Anna Collins (University of Birmingham),
Dr Zeynep Erdem (Royal NIOZ) and Dr Ebru Baykara (University Koblenz-Landau).
The main themes of the webinar were reading habits, the discovery of new research, the peer-review process and general issues and challenges in academia.
Watch the full webinar here. You can also listen to it by searching for Researcher Radio on your preferred podcast app.
Finding research
The first point discussed by the panel was how academics find new research and how they browse for new papers.
- All the speakers agreed that journals websites are a great source to find out what’s new, together with tools such as Researcher and ResearchGate.
- When it came to browsing new papers, our panel had different methods to keep up with literature, from conferences to receiving email notifications.
- They usually read new papers just before class so they could share their knowledge with their students, on their commute to and from home, spending around 5 to 20 hours per week reading. Even on weekends, it was hard for our panel to stop reading, as emails notifications tempted them to get back to browse new research.
- When reading, our panellists like both PDF and physical copies as it can be easier at times to take notes and compare with other literature.
- Social media and collaboration with colleagues it was also mentioned as another great way to be up to date with what’s relevant.
As reading all the information out there feels impossible, we asked our panellists how they assess the trustworthiness of a paper.
- They all used similar techniques to decide whether to read a paper, such as checking the h-index, the author, the experience of the author in the field, the papers cited, the abstract and the conclusion.
Peer Reviewing and academia
The other themes discussed by the panel were peer reviewing, the productivity techniques our panellists use and pain points in academia.
- To review a paper, they all looked at plagiarism, cited articles, publications cited (Are they new? Are they relevant?) and keywords for the specific subject so it is easier to see if a new paper is contributing to existing research or only repeating the same results. The methodology was also considered very important to look at, together with the research question, titles, conclusion and abstract.
- All panellists agreed that the reviewing process is too long and getting a quick rejection is better than having to wait for an answer for a long time.
- They also wished literature was easier to read, especially for those researchers who don’t speak English as their first language.
- Open access was another issue for authors, they all felt paywalls are a big obstacle to research and publishing in open access journals is good and should be encouraged.

