Thomas Van Hoey (司馬智)
In order to work at the cusp of innovative knowledge, it is important to be aware of existing research. For this, you need good information literacy skills. These skills can be split into three big areas: finding research and processing it so it becomes information that you can use later when developing your own research, and citing it so others can find the same works you used.
The first skill is finding existing research. In these days, most research ventures will start with a database (like google) query. It is better to use google scholar than regular google. Any key term will provide a number of related bibliographic entries of articles, books, book chapters etc. to which you may or may not have access. One of the best features to find cutting-edge research is looking at which articles have cited a certain work, do use this function if you want to highlight how relevant the work on a given topic is.
If you don’t have immediate access to the stuff you found on google scholar, there are a few ways of finding the article. The first way is checking if the library system of NTU maybe does have the piece of research, or maybe if you can get it through Inter-Library Loan. This can be especially useful for theses and dissertations.
The second way is in a legal grey area, but the open access movement has provided us (currently) with sites like Library Genesis, b-ok.org, and sci-hub where articles are shared.
The third way is asking the author if they are willing to share their work. This can seem a bit intimidating at first, but I have never had no for an answer. It seems most researchers are genuinely happy to share their work (if only to potentially get more citations).
The slightly more traditional way of finding research is going through dedicated databases. This is often actually better than the comfort and often mediocre papers that google brings, and especially for Chinese research it is advised to use databases like CNKI. The website of NTU library has links to the databases it has access to, but there are also those of Academia Sinica that are open to NTU.
The most traditional way is using published bibliographies to find more classical works in your field. This is often important for orientation of a key term.
When you found your research, it is time to read and take notes. I strongly advice to keep them digital or to later digitalize them and store them in a cloud-based account or app, so you can access them later or when you might move to another country.
I have used Evernote, but there are many other options out there, like notion, bear, notable, notability etc. As this is technology, there may be better options in the future, so look for apps that allow you to export your notes to simple formats like plain text.
I would not advice using Microsoft Word as that often becomes convoluted, but if that is what works for you, then by all means. The important thing is that you figure out a system that works for you, and that once in a while you try to optimize it. You will thank yourself in the future.
For instance, in my own process I first get the bibliographical record (see next step) of the work in Zotero, the citation manager I use. Then I generate the citation and make a new note in Evernote. The citation is the title of the note, and I also add “Date read: YYYYMMDD” so I (or in a different app) will be able to find it through the app’s search function, but also sort it by date. After this I write my general impression of the paper “good/bad/interesting that xxx was pointed out…” and then begin my notes.
Notes are very personal, but help you keep track of the stuff you read and your opinions on the debates highlighted. Try to give a clear overview of what a paper is about, with extra detail for the sections that are most relevant. It is okay to not treat every paper in the same way: some things will be more useful than others.
Last step, writing your literature review into your research. I strongly recommend using a citation manager. As mentioned, I use Zotero, but there is other software available, like endnote or Mendeley. Usually they will have a cite-while-you-write plugin or something similar that establishes a link between your Word document (or variant) that allows for easy citation in the preferred style.
If you use LaTeX, Zotero also allows you to export to BibTeX, where you can find citation keys for easy citation.
It is madness to do your bibliography by hand in these days. If there are mistakes, fix them in the citation manager, not in the document case by case.