Hello all,

I am doing an engineering PhD and I am currently doing a literature review. I am trying to keep positive! I am reading lots of papers and find some aspects difficult to understand, especially ones with maths involved. Any advice or words of wisdom on this?

Thanks

Hi, I'm in the social sciences so can't really give much advice on the maths side of things but this helps for me; if I'm reading about something complex that seems to follow some sort of sequence I draw a little picture/diagram as I am reading so that I get the relationship right, or a shape to show a relationship. Then I might go over it again to make sure I have everything right, then copy it out neatly if I think it will help me remember it. And I make loads of notes to myself in the margins. Subject dictionaries are really useful sometimes as well. I hope that helps, don't want to sound patronising but that works for me, I'm sure someone with a maths background will have better advice!

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No real words of wisdom, but just a general point: I found that it has taken me years to become familiar with some mathematical aspects of my PhD, and fact is that there are still many areas that I still do not understand (or could derive myself). Best thing you can do is to just to try and absorb as much as you can, and not go mental when having to look up things again and again. Sometimes textbooks can be useful to get back to a more basic approach to the maths side of things, I found. The previous suggestion of writing things out, drawing diagrams/flowcharts etc is good, and has helped me go through equations bit by bit. Good luck(sprout)

Try reading the introduction and conclusion first which gives you a sense of what the paper is about. If you then can't understand the main body of the paper, find other papers that cite the one that you're reading and try reading them instead to get a different view of the topic. In my experience mathematical and statistical techniques aren't explained well in research papers so it might help to find a couple of relevant text books to give you the technical background.

I do think that some academics like to dress up reletively simple concepts to make them sound smart and of course some are just not good at explaining things. I used to work for a prof whose standard response to any question was "Well, it's obvious isn't it!"

Good luck (up)

Thanks everyone, realy helpful advice!