digest
Short Summary
Main recommendation: Build a single presentation deck as a personal literature bank, using a templated slide per paper with the title, link, take-home message, interesting figures, and one of four tags (literature review, must read, method, or idea). Use this to skim papers quickly in a two-to-three-minute first pass, then return to only the useful papers for detailed reading and note-taking on printed copies. The speaker says he found this more effective than Excel, online programs, or a reference manager like Mendeley.
Key Points
- The first pass is a filter: skim the abstract and conclusions, and only read further if the paper can answer a question, supply a method, spark interest, or support a literature review.
- Tags give the reason a paper matters, so you can later find, for example, all methods or all review articles with Ctrl+F or by flipping through slides in presentation mode.
- Visual cues matter to the speaker: copying schematics, diagrams, or striking figures helps him recall papers ("the paper with the weird diagram").
- Detailed reading is a separate stage with no shortcut; AI summaries miss important content, so the speaker says he reads the full paper himself.
- After detailed reading, keep only the pages you need (e.g., methods) and discard the rest, to avoid being overwhelmed by printed papers.
- Use separate presentation files for different projects to avoid overlap between research areas.
Details Worth Noting
- Concrete instructions:
- Create a presentation (he uses Google Slides; PowerPoint also works) and build a template slide containing: paper title, paper link, take-home messages, interesting figures or notes, and tags at the bottom.
- Use four tags, deleting the ones that do not fit: "literature review" (basis for a review), "discovery" (new or interesting, worth sharing with your group or supervisor), "must read" (cornerstone paper you cannot skip), "method" (a technique you want to try, e.g., "must do in the lab"), and "idea" (something to mull over).
- For each paper, duplicate the template slide, paste the title and link, and skim the abstract and conclusions for phrases like "in this present study" to identify what was done.
- Write take-home messages in three bullets; he pastes the abstract or conclusions into an AI tool (ChatGPT) to generate a short summary, then pastes it as plain text ("paste without formatting") and checks it against the paper.
- Capture figures by splitting the screen (cheat sheet on one side, PDF on the other), then copying or screenshotting images that stand out.
- For detailed reading, print the paper, underline and annotate in the margins (he prefers red or green pen over highlighting), and read the methods section if you need methods.
- Keep only the pages you need, retaining the citation (or front page title), and discard the rest once the information is in your lab notebook.
- Keep separate slide decks or literature files for each project and copy relevant slides across when starting a new paper.
- The speaker estimates a first pass takes about two to three minutes per article, and says this lets him build a large bank of resources without wasting hours on unhelpful papers.
- Presentation mode lets you flick through slides quickly, which he finds more intuitive than scrolling through Excel or Notion.
- He mentions his newsletter (five emails over about two weeks), academiainsider.com with ebooks "The Ultimate Academic Writing Toolkit" and "PhD Survival Guide", plus forums and a blog.
Bottom Line
A cheap, visual, tagged slide deck works as a fast triage system for literature, with deep reading reserved for the small set of papers that truly matter.
