Hi all,

I have just collected a group of papers on a certain topic that I need to read. Would you recommend I read the ones that were written first and work my way down or should I read the oldest ones first? What do you do, and why?

Hi Chococake

I usually look at the titles/abstracts and try to work out which ones are likely to be the most general, to give the best overview when I'm starting out. Then I'll look for any recent review-type ones that might be in there. Then I'll look for the ones that seem to be most closely conected to whatever it is that I'm trying to get from the articles (e.g. if it's a particular aspect of a theoretical approach, or a particular method or setting for the research or whatever). If that doesn't get me started, I'll read the most recent, then start from the earliest and work forwards. But often my reading starts with the PDFs I've already downloaed before moving on to PDFs I can get easily and then finally the tricky ones that are hard to track down that I might not need to read after I've read everything else!