Speaker 1: If you want to read a paper quickly, there's only really one place you need to look, and that's the bottom of the abstract. So this is a typical paper. Here's the title, here's the authors, here's all the rubbish that they come with, and it's this part, it's this back end of the abstract, which is why most people would cite this paper. And this is true for nearly every scientific research paper. So if you look at this bit, it goes from here, the silver nanowire, carbon nanotube, PEDOPSS electrode was used to fabricate lower temperature annealing free devices. It's really that moment there. That is what I use to decide whether or not this paper is worth my time. Here's another example. Look, this is another one of my papers. Pathway to high throughput, blah blah blah. Okay, well, that's kind of interesting to me. What does this really mean? The nanocomposite electrode is highly flexible, organic photovoltaic devices up to 90% of control efficiencies. It's this part that is really interesting to me. So if I want to know what the crux of a paper is quickly, that's where I go to. I think that a lot of scientists and researchers actually quote a paper based on that information alone. And then we can expand from there. So where do I go from there? If I like the sound of this and I'm a real researcher, and I don't just read that and then cite it in a paper, which is arguably what a lot of people do, is then I would start looking at the figures. So this has captured my interest. This is number one. And then I'm looking down here and I'm like, okay, well, there's some equations. That's not really interesting to me. Experimental, no, that's not really interesting. This is interesting to me because clearly this is a fabrication process. So this is what I need to know about the context of the paper, because this is a paper about making something and therefore this is the way they made it. So that's interesting to me. Then I go all the way down. I just start looking for figures. I don't even read the text because a good figure should have a caption, which actually sort of like highlights... I didn't highlight that very well, did I? Here we go. A good figure should have a caption that just explains what it is anyway. So here we are. This is a good figure. I've got title on the axis. I've got a figure legend and I can kind of work out what's going on. If I need to, I can go down here. This is interesting to me. Once you're in a field for a certain sort of like amount of time, you start to understand the results and the figures. I know this is SEM. I know this is AFM just by looking at the figure. And so I can go, OK, well, that's interesting. What's the scale about? Yeah, I can start sort of like looking. Oh, they're electrically conductive. Well, that's good because this is like a conductivity measure. There's the current. Oh, great. Start scanning this one. Oh, more SEM images and then a T over R. What does that mean? I don't understand what that means. So we're going to go to see transmission spectra. OK, this is the transmission spectra. Perfect. So that is really where I go to. Oh, what's this? This is new for me. I don't really understand this. So then I'll look at this and say optical micrograph. This is this one. What are these two? That's Raman images. OK, I don't really know much about that, but that's interesting for me later on. So I can read a little bit more about this. And look, that is what I do. I go through the figures and I know about JV curves and I go, OK, well, this one here is the most efficient. Oh, that's 120 at 10 minutes. That's interesting to me. And so that's what essentially what I do if I want to read a paper quickly. These tables are fine, but this is, you know, here we are. The current density of the best? No, of the flexible PEN along with performance parameters. So here's something that I would be interested in as well. And then that's it. That's how I read a paper quickly. And then after that quick scan, I've now got a feeling for what this paper is. And now I need to ask myself, is there further information I want to get from this paper? If it is, then I start looking at those appropriate sections. So the results are very, very interesting to me. And then I'll start looking at the areas in which they kind of cite or talk about the references and figures I've highlighted. So this one is the Raman spectra. It's normally somewhere near. So we just need to start scanning for Raman. That's not in there. We could use our Raman signal. So this is, you know, quite often near the figure. But if not, you could use like control F or just search in the document for Raman. And then it's apparent the single wall carbon nanotubes on the surface of the electro. OK, so they're just saying that there's silver nanowires and carbon nanotubes at the surface. Well, that's fine. That's not really sort of like crazy. Interesting to me, this one. This is bend radius over time versus conductivity or resistance. I don't know if that's too interesting to me. So, yeah, that's essentially what I do. There is no need in a lot of sort of like these papers that you even end up knowing in a lot of detail to understand them and memorize them from the beginning all the way to the end. Taking the bits you need as you need them is the way you should approach any research paper that you're reading. OK, then the last thing I would do to make sure that I've really understood everything is go down to conclusions. And once again, the last I don't know why, why do we do this to ourselves? It's always the last sort of paragraph, the last bit that really is the most interesting thing. So this is what I would be interested in. The planar silver nanowire, blah, blah, electrode is highly flexible and resistant to fatigue. So that's interesting. Potential use for novel applications. There we are. Perfect. So it's this last bit of the conclusions that I would go to to understand whether or not this is that kind of like paper that I should really understand or if it's just like a citable paper that I can throw away later and, you know, come back to if I need to. So that's it really. That is how I would go from zero anything, not knowing anything about a paper to understanding it enough to be able to understand if it's suitable for my research or not. Let's have a look at another one. This one, accurate thickness measurement of graphene. I'm going to scan this one. And first of all, I'm going to come down. I'm going to forget about the title, the people. I don't care about that. I care about this part down here. So I'm going to start looking at where they start of sort of say, you know, this is what we found. And here we are. Here's the sort of like key term I'm looking for in this work. We use standard blah, blah, blah. So it's this bit that I want to sort of like look at. And then I go, yeah, OK, I get this. This last sentence is always interesting. Normally, the last sentence is something like the application or the novelty or really the cheeky take home message that the researchers want you to really have. And then I go down, I start looking. OK, lots of words, lots of words. Big table, not interested in that at the moment. Anyway, this is what I'm interested in. A nice big figure. And this figure is beautiful. You can see that they've got actual G band intensity. So what does G band mean? So I'm going to go to B and I'm going to look at B and it's going to say ramen, more ramen. That's why I don't understand it. And then we've got AFM. I do know this. This is AFM. This is height. So this is telling me the height of the graphene sheet, that it's a single layer and they've measured it to be about 1.25, 1.5 nanometers in height. So that's what I'm looking for. Oh, here we are. Increasing peak force set point. And then, oh, brilliant. This is exactly what I want. This is essentially the take home message. They've done a great job of presenting that information. And then I'll keep scanning there some more stuff. OK, we've got some schematics. Schematics normally is a description or a sort of simplified take home message sometimes. And that's what this one is. They're just showing you there that there's a buffer layer to the graphene. And when you push higher, that that sort of displaces the buffer layer that's absorbed on the surface. I like that. Oh, here's some SEM images. I don't even need to look at the caption. I know this is SEM because I'm familiar with the field. And that's it. OK. And then all the way down here, I'm going to the last bit of the conclusions. There we are. This bit. From this finding, it was hypothesized that the pressure applied to graphene is a key parameter. And OK, so there we are. That's what I want. That's the take home message of the paper. And then if I'm actually replicating any results, if I'm trying to do what they've done, clearly I need to know this in more detail. So I would go to something like methods, which, to be honest with you, I skip over nearly every paper. I don't know. I don't care about the methods. A lot of people don't care unless you're trying to do this exact procedure, this exact experiment or replicate it in any way. Clearly, then, it's very, very important. But until that point, you can skip over a lot of it. Here are some other little cheeky tips about papers that you will probably need. Every research paper has an introduction. Look at it. Here it is. It's quite a lot. To be honest with you, most of us don't read it. But you do read it if you're in the early stages of a new research project and you need to understand what the research is really about and you need to get a more of a background understanding. So if I'm entering a new field, I will read the introduction as like tiny literature reviews for me because you can see there's a lot of stuff cited. So that gives me the ability to get an understanding of the field in general. But five years into a research project, you probably scan over this. You probably just like go, OK, I get it, I get it, because you've written so many of these yourself that it is almost pointless in reading more. But if there's something in there that tickles that old fancy of yours, tickle, tickle, fancy, fancy, oh, that was gross. Then you can obviously look at the references and go delve deeper into that. But most of the time, introduction later on in a research project, forget about it. Later on in a research project, you want to become familiar with all of the different authors on a paper. In a particular field, you will have particular researchers that just pop up, pop, pop, pop all the time. These well-known researchers you want to know as well because you're likely going to see them at conferences. You're likely going to interact with them in some way if you continue in this research field, even if you reach out just to ask them for advice, ask them for a paper, whatever it is. Once you're in a research field for a long time, the authors do actually become interesting. And rightly or wrongly, it is the first place a lot of people look at. They go, OK, yeah, whatever. This is a paper. Who actually wrote it? And once you're familiar with the big players in your field, you'll understand whether or not this is a paper you should take seriously or not. It's not necessarily a good aspect of research, but the fact that they're the second thing after the title that you read means that clearly we value it a lot as researchers. The last thing I really like to do is I like to take these figures and schematics from whatever paper I'm reading and put them into a PowerPoint and put this on its own slide. So I would get this, copy it and paste it into a PowerPoint and then just put one or two sentences. If I put something like this, I will often also put the last part of the abstract, which is here. The nanoparticle devices exhibit power conversion efficiencies, blah, blah, blah. I would put this bit in because that's the take home message with the schematics or figures that interest me so that later on, I've got this PowerPoint that is just easy to scan. If you want to know more about it, go check out this video. I talk about how to read like a PhD, because that is, I think, the most important thing I did during my postdoc and my PhD. Go check it out.