A paper a day: my experience
On June 6, 2019, I started as a bioinformatics lab technician in the Rothenfluh laboratory. With only a few months of bioinformatics experience and no background in neuroscience or Drosophila, I felt fairly overwhelmed by the sheer volume of knowledge of the two fields. How could anyone possibly have a comprehensive, and up-to-date understanding of the literature?
Around the same time, I came across a Twitter thread in which a prominent scientist (I can’t remember who it was) discussed how she had been reading a paper a day, usually taking advantage of her time on public transportation to fulfill this task. She mentioned how she felt caught up on the literature in her field, and her daily reading gave her the opportunity to learn from new discoveries in other fields. Her experience inspired me to take up the same goal. I was to read AT LEAST one paper a day, all in the name of understanding my field of work better. I am proud (I think) to report that I have read 509 papers since June 6, 2019, which comes out to an average of 1.14 papers per day.
What did I learn from all of this reading? Well, for one thing, there is what feels like an infinite amount of papers out there. There are papers about anything and everything. And the scientific literature just keeps on growing and growing, especially with the advent of preprint servers such as aRxiv and bioRxiv. I’d say that bioRxiv was definitely the site where I read most of the articles, usually by clicking into the Bioinformatics section or searching for ‘atac-seq’ papers. To be honest, I do feel like I have gained a pretty good grasp on my field (ATAC-seq is where I spend most of my time). One could argue that I would have the exact same understanding of the field as I do know without reading so much, but I think that my reading definitely assisted my comprehension. One thing I will say, however, is that I did not read these papers as in depth as maybe I should have. Maybe this is partly due to me glossing over the algorithms in technical papers and avoiding the supplemental material in biological papers. It is hard (and maybe not a great use of time) to really dive into a paper day after day. This has led to me having a good grasp on the breadth of the field, with few papers that really stood out to me. Another issue I had was that I didn’t have an organized way of finding articles. I mostly just searched Google Scholar and bioRxiv with the same key terms over and over. This led to occasional days where I couldn’t find anything interesting to read. Searching for a paper can be a real time suck.
Am I glad I tried reading a paper a day? Absolutely. I read some of the foundational works in bioinformatics and gained a greater understanding of my field of work. I can better converse with and understand other bioinformaticians, as well as wet-lab scientists like my PI. Will I do it again? Hopefully not. I think there are better ways of keeping abreast of current research and especially retaining any new information. This post is actually inspired by Tim Stuart’s post regarding his similar experience. While I have only done a couple of journal clubs, I would have to concur with him that I got much more out of taking my time with one or two papers. Those papers have stayed with me. So for the next few months (at least), I will be following Tim’s lead and read 2-3 papers a week. I will keep them to the same overall theme and then summarize them in a blog post (and possibly Twitter)! Hopefully, this will help me learn to better read and critique research, a skill I stand in great need to develop. Presumably, the information will stick with me, and I will all the better for it!