How many hours per day do you spend reading textbook and research papers?

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real smart

I already know everything there is to know
AMA

I try to fit at least 2 hours of reading into my schedule. Textbooks, fiction, etc are things I read in my free time

When I read something, it's usually so I can do something. For instance, when I wanted to create a cheap controller for a specific application, I read about intermediate electrical circuit elements like voltage regulators and JFETs, and I went no deeper down than how to use them because that information was useless for creating my controller. When I had a jar of extra pickle juice and figured that it's essentially just a jar of vinaigrette, I looked up recipes that use lots of vinaigrette. When I wanted to optimize my old Project Euler solutions, I wound up learning a lot about statistics, linear algebra, and discrete mathematics. It all stuck.

In practice, reading up on and learning things is a pretty futile endeavor unless you're doing it for a purpose. Otherwise, you'll lose the knowledge entirely because there was no type of experience to connect those neurons to. In effect, the quantity of textbooks and research papers you read doesn't make you any smarter unless you use them, because having more information doesn't necessarily mean you're any better at using that information. Just that you can regurgitate it for a couple weeks.

It's like the whole time crystal nonsense where people think they're so smart because they can use terms like time symmetry and four-dimensional crystalline structures, when all a time crystal is is a bunch of particles moving back and forth in harmonic motion, as if they're all connected by springs but taking a really long time to stop because lolfriction. It's a travesty that something so simple can escape so many people who claim to be smart, but it does illustrate that just because you can read, it doesn't mean you can think.

During the summer about 9-10 hours a day.

how many fingers am i holding up?

If you actually start doing science, you may find that maintaining literacy in your field requires getting the fuck out of your own head and placing value on the work of others independent of your own.
>just because you can read, it doesn't mean you can think
Without reading, your thinking is shit.

I spend at least 12hrs a week dipping into my Google Scholar alerts and it is never enough. This is in addition to the reading I do in the course of my actual job, which is easily twice as much of my time in any given month.

>tfw your PI wants to talk about a paper and you've already read the preprint.

18 hours

Can you explain to me what are Google scholar alerts? How do you decide what you want to be alerted by?

Do you follow specific subjects or scientists?

fpbp

I have mess of scripts which run searches and scrape pdfs. There are probably better ways to do it (IFTTT?) but this is what works for me lately.

>Do you follow specific subjects or scientists?
The short answer is yes. I have a handful of journals that I monitor comprehensively. When people in my "science family" publish or are cited, I want to know about it. I track papers that arise from research I've seen presented e.g. at conferences. Sometimes I will keep an ear out for new papers citing work I have previously read. When I encounter work at any point in the review process, I try to follow up on it e.g. where do rejected papers get accepted? Then there are tranches of keywords for projects I am or have or want to work on. These queries vary in complexity -- "keep running a lit review from 5 years ago so I can do ad-hoc followup", "are there datasets being used to validate newly developed methods for work in my wheelhouse that I don't already have at hand? find them and their initial publications", "these are words I am making up does anybody use them", etc.

This is very interesting. Thank you for sharing.

Do you have any other advice for or tips on doing good research like in routine, networking, etc? I just started researching this summer

>you'll lose the knowledge entirely because there was no type of experience to connect those neurons to
lmao, read some more books kid

>getting the fuck out of your own head and placing value on the work of others independent of your own
That's entirely what I'm advocating. Did you miss the part where I used the independent work of others to inform my own work? If you're actually doing science, as you claim, your searches are informed at least tangentially by the things you're actually working on. If you're working in astrophysics, you're probably not studying the biology of the echidna. You stay literate to enhance your understanding of your own work and things you're interested in working on, not to dick wave about how many papers you've read.

>I used the independent work of others to inform my own work
>the independent work of others has value when it informs my own work
>the value of the work of others depends on whether I allow it to inform my own work
>I ME THE SMART ONE ME ME ME

The fact that you think this is equivalent to what I said places your risible attitude in context. Sometimes the things we suck at suck because we suck at them.

To reiterate my point, reading papers that have nothing to do with your work is essential to the scientific enterprise. People are better at science than you. Reading their work will provide you the opportunity to learn from them. Forgoing this opportunity because you can't see beyond your dumb little problem doesn't make you efficient, it makes you a moron. Inuring your work from novel translational ideas or synthesis which may only be apparent in relief makes your work shit. If you can perform your work in isolation from contemporary research programs, you're not doing science.

I've already absorbed all the knowledge of humanity. There's nothing left for me to read.

Get in the habit of pulling the references for a paper before you read it. Especially when you're starting out, treat citations as prerequisites for understanding an author's statement; it is infinitely more likely that you will misread the author in the absence of the reference than any alternative. Prepare for reviews or survey papers by reading an earlier treatment of the issue which they cite and at least one of similar vintage which they do not. Context illuminates. Find someone who does work you want to do that blogs or tweets. Contrast their formal and informal engagement with the field.

Find the right place in your workflow for citation management and stick to it. When your solution fails, push it further upstream.

>perform your work in isolation from contemporary research programs
>>the value of the work of others depends on whether I allow it to inform my own work

You misrepresented me twice here. Again, I'm advocating FOR the use of other people's work, and I never said the knowledge wasn't valuable. I'm saying that it's useful in the hands of people who know what the hell they're reading because they can grasp the implications of it without just being able to regurgitate it.

If you're in any scientific field, there's a nigh endless well of relevant information on sites like Research Gate and the Web of Knowledge, and reading a high quantity of relevant papers is indeed useful for making you a better worker. The key word here is "relevant," and the metric imposed by the thread as only quantity without regard to quality doesn't separate you from the so-smart popsci kiddies who think that a piece of journalism is a research paper. You read relevant papers because you can do something with it, be it actionable or intellectual. What matters isn't if you can read the paper, because anyone here can do that. What matters if you know what you're reading.

In a word: quantity does not directly inform quality.

>textbooks
what am I, an undergrad?

>research papers
2 hr

edgy

I don't read every day, but when I read, I read pretty much all day long.

7 today, about to go for more. Been reading about hierarchy theory to confirm my suspicion that it's is merelogical bullshit

This, reading is for brainlets

not enough, I read some today
like an hour
I'm going to go into hypermode tomorow
I swear this time for real

yes me too
always tomorrow

not this time
from the moment I wake up tomorrow shit's gonna get real

godspeed

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ez :^)

Four fingers up in my ass

ooops 4th dimension

About 8 during school, close to 10 during summer.

Zero. Up until I was 22, I would spend countless hours every day reading research, scientific news and learning about various technologies.
I had several ideas that turned out to be profitable, because I get to sit back in my misery and watch other people get rich doing things I could have done if I wasn't so unlucky. Now I've just given up and I feel horrible every time I'm reminded of such things.

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5 or 6 hours, depends if there's experimentation or writing to do.

I read a lot of articles/research about climate change, I fact check and argue with people online, I read books on overpopulation and sustainability.

About 2-5 hours a day desu

Nuclear or renewables?

I spend 15 hours a day reading the Akashic records

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5 hours a day