1. Get food & name tag
2. Sit in groups of 5 next to people you don’t know
3. Introduce yourself using the slide you made

Today: Strategies for a literature search

But before that, recap:

• What were everyone’s takeaways from last class about how to skim a paper?

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Today: Strategies for a literature search

But before that, recap:

• What were everyone’s takeaways from last class about how to skim a paper?
• Has anyone tried this strategy over the last week? How did it go?

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Today: Strategies for a literature search

But before that, recap:

• What were everyone’s takeaways from last class about how to skim a paper?
• Has anyone tried this strategy over the last week? How did it go?
• What are some takeaways from the pre-class work about citation biases?

Today: Strategies for a literature search

• What is the purpose of a literature search?

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Today: Strategies for a literature search

• What is the purpose of a literature search?
• Forethought: What makes a literature search hard?
• Orienting yourself in an unfamiliar field
• Filtering through hundreds of papers
• Keeping organized of the papers you’ve read

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Today: Strategies for a literature search

• What is the purpose of a literature search?
• Forethought: What makes a literature search hard?
• Orienting yourself in an unfamiliar field
• Filtering through hundreds of papers
• Keeping organized of the papers you’ve read
• What do you find hard? Examples from pre-class work
• Fear of misunderstanding the paper
• Fear of missing important work
• Seminal works?
• Comprehensive lit review?
• Parallel fields?
• How can I make sure I don’t cite for the sake of citing?

The ins-and-outs of a literature search

(1)

Refining search criteria

Brainstorm project

Project topic

Keywords

Component 1: Refining your search criteria

(1)

Refining search criteria

Google

Brainstorm project

Project topic

Keywords

Goal: break down your project topic into a list of precise keywords that will return relevant papers on the topic upon search.

Performance: help-seeking by asking another person for good keywords

In groups of 5: what are good keywords for this problem?

Problem: There is significant bias in the data collection used Genome-Wide Association Studies (GWAS) towards populations that identify as of European ancestry. As a result, statistical models of the data are substantially less predictive for populations identifying as of non-European ancestry.

Significance: Increased health disparities between populations identifying as of European vs. non-European ancestry.

Goal: To develop statistical methodology capable of both using existing data and effectively leveraging data from a more inclusive collection process to generalize well to populations identifying as of non-European ancestry.

*you can use Harvard Hollis to get behind paywalls when trying to access papers (instructions here)

Regroup

• What were the keywords found?
• How did you find them?
• How did you know they were relevant?
• What was hard about this?

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Component 2: Categorizing your papers

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(2)

Categorizing a paper

Reading*

Papers

• Searching your keywords
• Searching your keywords in this URM scientists citation database
• Going “up” the citation tree
• Going “down” the citation tree
• Following the author/lab group, not just the citations

Reading goal

Goal: Figure out which papers to read, how much to focus on each paper, and what to read for.

Component 2: Categorizing your papers

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How is this paper relevant to my research topic?

Read for a problem statement + importance

Read for feasibility

Read for understanding

Solves same problem

Solves similar problem

Solves subproblem

Read for a contrastive sentence

Motivates my problem

In groups of 5: which papers are relevant? How did you know?

tinyurl.com/5z78mzda

In groups of 5: how would you categorize the papers?

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• Motivates the problem
• Solves the same problem
• Solves a similar problem
• Solves a subproblem

Component 3: Tracking papers

• Tools of the trade: citation managers (Zotero, Mendeley, EndNote)
• Google Scholar Extension, helps you double check
• A searchable document to keep summaries

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What to put in each summary? Consider:

• Problem statement (one sentence)
• Relevance to project (same problem, similar problem, or sub-problem)?
• Brief description: usually one sentence of contributions/explanation of how it relates to my paper.

Self-reflection: self-evaluation of whether a certain system works for you and how to adapt

Announcements

1. Next week: fellowships
2. Pre-class work: watch together on the big screen!
3. Answer in-class survey
4. Course website has in-depth material from our class