3 ms·

quality > quantity I doubt there are 400,000 papers worth reading in all of medicine. A major skill in research is understanding what to read, and how careful

quality > quantity I doubt there are 400,000 papers worth reading in all of medicine. A major skill in research is understanding what to read, and how carefully. Prepping to write a review usually involves about 150 articles, for me. About 50 of them just need a cursory look, and the abstract often suffices. Another 80 or so need some more attention; you might be looking for patterns in the methods used, cross-referencing results, figuring out what labs are doing what, tracking authors over time, etc. This is how you understand the state of a field. The last 20 or so are the bulk of your time. A few are genuinely excellent and will be a highlight of the review. Some are simply solid work that requires a good amount of attention. A fair number are terrible and highly misleading. These are the papers that look okay, but have some flaws that need to be addressed by the field at large. It takes some tact to write about these, but it's usually not too bad. Finding good authors, especially ones that write good reviews, can get you up to speed in a field in an afternoon. An evening chasing down citations and digging a bit on your own, and you're probably about where Bill was with this. Since Alzheimer's is a pretty big subject requiring familiarity with a variety of topics, I'd give it two weeks.

Nomentatus 9y ago
There probably are that many worth reading in all, but remember I read in medicine as a whole with one particular disease as a touchstone and as stated, I read the abracts of 400,000 and took notes on over 100,000; so there were some worth reading, by no means all! It's amazing how much is published, and how no-one is paid to just go read and wander through them. If you decide to just accept the standard consensus view of any moment in time, that will of course be a remarkably narrow view compared to the actual empirical evidence and might be covered in a day, starting with Wikipedia 'cause stereotypes are like that. I was reading, of course, in order to avoid just that problem. Look at everything published in a month or week on a fairly narrow medical subject and lots of tangents from and to that, and your eyes will likely open wider, too. Very important studies are usually unexpected - that's part of what makes them important so we're verging on a tautology, there. So it's a matter of hindsight, in every field which contemporary articles are in fact "the classics." Your certainty and trust in current authorities broad knowledge and open-mindedness is a product of not knuckling down to read the abstracts of a few hundred thousand unrecommended journal articles - as well as a profound ignorance about the history of medicine. That history more than suggests that if you want quality>authority (of contemporary publications) you'd better start reading, and reading nearly everything.

Nomentatus 9y ago

There probably are that many worth reading in all, but remember I read in medicine as a whole with one particular disease as a touchstone and as stated, I read the abracts of 400,000 and took notes on over 100,000; so there were some worth reading, by no means all! It's amazing how much is published, and how no-one is paid to just go read and wander through them. If you decide to just accept the standard consensus view of any moment in time, that will of course be a remarkably narrow view compared to the actual empirical evidence and might be covered in a day, starting with Wikipedia 'cause stereotypes are like that. I was reading, of course, in order to avoid just that problem. Look at everything published in a month or week on a fairly narrow medical subject and lots of tangents from and to that, and your eyes will likely open wider, too. Very important studies are usually unexpected - that's part of what makes them important so we're verging on a tautology, there. So it's a matter of hindsight, in every field which contemporary articles are in fact "the classics." Your certainty and trust in current authorities broad knowledge and open-mindedness is a product of not knuckling down to read the abstracts of a few hundred thousand unrecommended journal articles - as well as a profound ignorance about the history of medicine. That history more than suggests that if you want quality>authority (of contemporary publications) you'd better start reading, and reading nearly everything.