I have a little "hack" that I find extremely helpful for getting a sense of specific research fields. Journal articles, even review papers, are cramped for spa

I have a little "hack" that I find extremely helpful for getting a sense of specific research fields. Journal articles, even review papers, are cramped for space and so tend to be very dense. The author suggests methods for doing battle with this density, but I suggest that, before doing that, you search for a class of document that's allowed to be as expansive as the author desires, and whose authors have recently struggled to learn and understand their content, and so tend to be expansive: PhD Theses Find out what research group published the research, find out which graduate students have recently graduated from that group, and read their theses (if the author's command of the language of publication isn't what you'd prefer ... find another graduate student). I guarantee you it will function much better as an introduction to what the group does than trying to parse any of their journal publications. In particular, the "draw the experiment" step will often be solved for you, with photographs, at least in the fields where I've done this.