Hello all,

Just musing. How thorough are you when reading papers/books/articles? Occasionally I will concentrate really hard and make loads of notes but most of the time I skim read and only concentrate on the bits that are essential. I very rarely read books all the way through (apart from fiction, as I study literature!). I also read as I write, so I'll think 'hmm, I 'll see if everyone's written anything about that', do a search and cherry-pick the bits that fit in with/contradict/inform what I'm writing at the time.
I sometimes worry that my general knowledge suffers because of this because I rarely remember author's names, or have a good general overview of individual works.
Over to you...

Hi KC,

I know exactly how you feel, i work exactly the same and sometimes feel that it may be detrimental. However, I doubt it would be possible to read everything thoroughly and store all the information - either that or i just have a really small brain capacity compared with many academics (which i often feel may be the case :$)

I have no words of wisdom for you, but am interested to find out what others say!

I'm much the same - I rarely read a paper from start to finish, and tend to only skim to find relevant bits. But I do agree that my general knowledge of the subject is lacking as a result - although I've cited a lot of papers in my thesis, I couldn't tell you much about what's in any of them!

Hi! It depends what it is really...if it's an article from a review I'm doing then I tend to read it pretty thoroughly and make notes, but if I just need a couple of papers to back up something I'm saying then I just tend to just skim them to check that they say what I need them to say and leave it at that. I have referenced things in a published paper that I haven't read from cover to cover, such as papers which discuss the theoretical concepts/models I am referring to but describe them in more detail than I can fit into my paper (or more detail than anyone would really care for anyway!). I do feel a bit bad about that sort of thing, but we're only human, and we have to prioritise how we spend our time! Says me...sitting tapping away on PGF!! But it is my first day back after my car accident nearly 5 weeks ago so I'm allowed a slack day! Best wishes all, KB

Hi KC,

My supervisor suggested this style of skim research to me a few weeks ago, so it can't just be a student or post-grad method to save time-and the sleep reading through countless boring articles!. To put it in context, a lot of the main articles and literature that provide structure to my lit review have been read really thoroughly. Her suggestion was to keep reading but to cherry pick and read in a very focused manner just for material that applied to my topic and to skim or skip the rest.
It's for a Master's though-but I expect the idea is the same. If it helps, I often have to revise 'who' said 'what' with these types of readings. Again it tends to be only the really significant authors and material that I know thoroughly and whose names I remember-or the really creative and different ones.

This post made me feel a lot better - good to know I'm not the only one!

Ahhh, just wrote a reply and it disappeared into cyberspace.

Anyway, thanks for the replies everybody and I'm glad to see that this seems to be the normal- perhaps even best!- appraoch to reading. Alpaca I feel that way too about my brain capacity. I can clean forget the name of an author I've read loads of times. So perhaps reading things all the way through wouldn't make much difference anyway!

Honestly, Keep_Calm, as the others have said, it's nigh on impossible to actually read everything from end-to-tail because there's just so much of it. Like you, I just tend skim read stuff and take bits from here and there, and then, if I find something really important, I'll read it all. I actually feel a bit guilty and like a cheat because I've got references in my work that I have barely read...:$