Is Reading an Academic Paper a Day a Good Daily Habit?

Well, I know a lot of worse habits than that.

If you are an academic yourself, I can imagine how it can develop you immensely (I’ll go back to it).

If you are not an academic, you can explore the academic output in your area of expertise — whatever it is — and benefit from that.

For an average person, it may be a great pastime activity to broaden their horizons (however, I would advise reading more abstracts and less of the main body; if you are not familiar with the academic language and style of writing, it can become gruesome very quickly).

If You Are an Academic

A habit of reading a paper a day will position you ahead of the pack in no time. Even if you limit yourself to one paper per working day, it gives something like 250 papers a year. How many people do you know who do this?

You will learn how other academics write. You will notice patterns, both best practices and worst practices. Your papers will become better because of that.

You will need to go through dozens of papers a month. You will notice not only high-quality material, but also ways other academics use to put their works “out there” (in the real world it’s called marketing).

You will learn how to make your works more shareable and get wider exposure. You will get more influence.

By knowing so many papers, you will be able to reference more of them and make those references more insightful and meaningful. That will open you up doors for cooperation with folks (oh, pardon me, “doctors and professors”) to whose works you referenced.

In short, you will become a much better academic yourself within a relatively short amount of time.

And I cannot even come up with some unexpected additional benefits, because I know this world only superficially.

The synergy will kick in, and you will gain advantages you’d never have expected.

One example from my area of expertise

I’m a self-published writer. In the process of working, publishing and marketing my 15 books, I got very good at discerning good books from bad ones. I spent so much time on Amazon browsing through categories, reading reviews, authors’ profiles and book descriptions that I need less than a minute to conclude if the book is worth reading or not (which most of the time comes down to “if the author is any good or not”).

I didn’t try to become an expert in the area of picking great non-fiction books. It happened as a byproduct of my main activities.

You will notice similar unexpected benefits after reading a few hundred academic papers, I’m sure of it.

I’m sure you will also become an expert in finding the great papers that are worth reading in the ocean of papers produced every day.

It simply comes with practice.

Originally published at www.quora.com.