How I research I: Finding papers

Aug 10, 2022

This is the first in a series of posts about how I do research. The first few posts will be about how I find, organize, and read research papers. This can be deceptively hard, but I've found a few great tools that I couldn't do without.

Here, I'm going to go through how I find old papers and keep up with new ones. I'll talk about two tools: ADS and Benty-Fields .

ADS: Astrophysics Data System

ADS is my one-stop shop for searching for papers and doing literature reviews. It is great , and if I ever switched fields, I would have no idea how to find papers without it.

It indexes just about every journal you would need, and arXiv, and more . It lets you search them for papers going back more than a century, and neatly keeps track of authors, citations, and associated data. It's really fantastic.

It works great as a simple search bar, but you can easily add specific search criteria as well. To look for papers by a certain author, add author:"Lastname, F" . If you want papers where they're a first author, make it author:"^Lastname, F" (with the carrot ^ ). If you want papers published in a certain year, add year:2016 . It's pretty simple, and the various magic codes are helpfully documented on their main page.

Say I'm looking for recent review articles on self-interacting dark matter. I search dark matter reviews(self-interacting dark matter) year:2022 and it gives me 58 hits.

Great! The third one looks great to me, so I click on it.

With the bar on the left, you can search through it's references and citations. On the right, you can find the arXiv version of the paper. When it is officially published, the journal version will appear alongside it. This paper has no associated data, but if it did, links to the data would appear on the right.

Tip: Browser Search Shortcut

Here's the real pro move: make a shortcut to quickly search ADS. In Firefox, you can do this by going to the ADS search page, right-clicking the search bar, and selecting "Add a Keyword for this Search". A bookmark menu will appear. Under keyword, put ads .

Now you can search ADS directly from your search bar! Open a new tab, and enter ads (your search) , and it will take you straight to ADS just like this.

And boom! You get your search results straightaway.

Benty-Fields: Keeping up with new papers

I use Benty-Fields to check new papers on the arXiv most days. When you make an account, it asks you for your research interests, and serves you papers it thinks would interest you. You can vote them up or down, and it's algorithm adjusts to what you're actually interested in.

You can even link your own papers to your Benty-Fields account, so people can quickly find your website, GitHub, twitter, or whatever information you associate with your account.

Go to the "Papers" tab, and it will show you papers from each day in the last week or so. It helpfully puts papers it thinks you'll like first. By default, it just shows title and authors, but you can check a box to expand all of their abstracts. To go to the paper on arXiv, click the "View PDF" button or the arXiv code below each paper.

Here is what my feed looks like today:

It's not perfect, but it's a huge help: It keeps me up to date on relevant work with the least amount of effort.

Next: Organizing papers with Zotero

Now that you are finding interesting papers, what do you do with them? In the next post I'll talk how I save and organize papers with Zotero .