Q: Articles?! Those are hard to read. Why do we care?

Here’s a deep secret in the world of academics: books don’t really count.

When it comes to what really matters for a scholar’s reputation, it’s all about the journal articles (aka “papers”). These are the tough, often dense pieces of writing that get reviewed by other experts in the same field. It’s here that scholars have to show their evidence carefully, argue precisely, and use the right methods. They get rewarded (or sometimes criticized) based on what they publish in journals, not in books.

And sure, we love books! But they're just a totally different source from academic papers. Books are often designed to be more readable and exciting to the general public. Scholars can use their books to experiment, speculate, or even oversimplify their research to such a degree that it can end up looking totally different from the “real” version. 

The world of academic journal articles is the place where the engine of human knowledge is actually running. It's where ideas get tested, challenged, and sharpened.

So if you want to really go in depth with your topic, then it may be worth consulting a few academic journal articles.

Step 0: Consult Wikipedia & Simple English Wikipedia

As the Enlightenment swelled in the 1740s, a few French philosophes realized that a single tool could go a long way to making the world more rational: a modern encyclopedia written by the country’s leading intellectuals. The group endured infighting, religious censorship, and even threats of imprisonment, but after two decades, they produced the famous French Encyclopédie, the crowning jewel of the Enlightenment (that, and the metric system).

Wikipedia is the successor to this project.

Before you start searching for academic journal articles on your topic, search for your topic on Wikipedia and Simple English Wikipedia.

Spend a couple of minutes skimming some of its articles related to your topic, its instances, and its aspects.

Step 1: Find a Fight

Journals come into their own when you’re researching topics that scholars still don’t understand, or even better, topics that they disagree on. You’re going to go on the hunt for fights.

In the scholarly community, 🧙‍♂️UNSOLVED MYSTERIES and 👩‍🔬WARRING IDEAS a.k.a. fights are all the same thing. You can always find a scholar willing to give a wild theory about something, and support it with evidence — that’s what we pay them to do! A question isn’t answered when one researcher suggests an answer. It’s answered when almost all the researchers agree it’s probably right.

Q: How do I find a fight?

You might have already found a fight in your research questions.

Or, with a bit of tweaking, you could phrase your research questions in a way that's more polarizing, more looking for a fight! 

You could use an AI to help:

Act as a researcher in [aspect of my topic]. I'm going to tell you a question I have; give me a sense of what percent of scholars agree upon a rough answer (from 0–100%). Don't tell me any of their answers, though — right now, I'm just looking for numbers. Here's my first question: [a question]

Q: Alas, the answers to all my questions are already agreed upon by the scholarly community!

Ah! You finally got the quiet life you were looking for, but not at the time you wanted it! 😆 If you need some unanswered questions, you could just ask an AI for ideas:

Act as a researcher in [aspect of my topic]. List questions that researchers still don't agree on.

Step 2: Search for Articles

Now that you’ve found a (probable) 👩‍🔬WARRING IDEA, it’s time to find some actual research about it. It’s time to search for articles!

Option 1: Google Scholar

Google Scholar is basically a giant search engine for academic writing. Think of it as “Google for researchers.”

• Where does it get its articles? Google Scholar indexes millions of journal articles, conference papers, theses, dissertations, and books from academic publishers, professional societies, university repositories, and preprint servers. It’s not perfect, but it covers a huge range of disciplines and gives you a much more research-focused set of results than “regular” Google.

• How to use it: 

  • Just type in keywords related to your topic, like “fiber optics in astronomy” or “spice trade history 1600s.”

  • You could also ask your AI for the Digital Object Identifier (DOI) numbers of journal articles. The DOI is essentially the specific barcode of a journal article, and you can then use that to search for the article on Google Scholar. Here's a prompt you could use:

What's the most classic journal article that's been published in support of the theory that [the theory, as your AI described it]? Include the DOI.

• What to look for:

  • Titles that sound directly relevant.

  • Abstracts (the summaries) to check if the article matches your angle.

  • [PDF] or [HTML] links on the right-hand side of results — these often let you download the full article for free.

• Why it matters: Google Scholar is a first stop for almost every researcher in the world. It may feel dense at first, but it’s the most straightforward way to get your hands on academic work.

Option 2: Follow the References

Every good book, article, or even niche blog usually points back to its sources. That’s your breadcrumb trail.

• Check bibliographies and endnotes. If you’ve been reading a book about your topic, flip to the back pages. Chances are, the author has already dug up some of the most important journal articles for you.

• Check footnotes in blogs or essays. Passionate writers often cite academic papers. Follow those links—it can save you hours of searching.

• Why it matters: This method helps you find the classic or foundational articles—the ones scholars keep returning to. If something shows up in multiple bibliographies, it’s probably central to the field.

Option 3: Try Consensus (AI for Academic Search)

Consensus is a new AI tool built specifically to search academic research.

• How it works: You type in a plain-English question, like “Did the spice trade cause major cultural exchange between Europe and Asia?” Consensus then searches a database of peer-reviewed articles, summarizes the answers it finds, and shows you the actual papers behind the summary.

• Best features:

  • Synthesize view: gathers multiple papers and shows what percentage agree/disagree.

  • Copilot: helps refine your question or dig deeper into a topic.

  • Always points you back to the original articles, so you can check the source.

• Consensus offers a free plan. The features are obviously limited, but we'd say pretty generous, and enough to give it a try for this LiD Quest. Check out their help page for more information (and for the latest on what they offer —  these things change!). You'll also need to register/sign up to use the platform.

• Limitations: It’s not as flexible as ChatGPT or Claude — you can’t just have a wide-ranging conversation. But it’s laser-focused on journals.

• Why it matters: It gives you a quick snapshot of the “state of the debate” without slogging through dozens of PDFs.

Step 3: Read the Abstracts

Every academic paper starts with an “abstract” — around 200 words that give you the elevator pitch for the article. It’s a snapshot that distills the essence of the research: what was done, how it was done, what was discovered, and why it matters. Abstracts are generally free to access, and if you spend time on the abstract, you can figure out if the paper is relevant to you.

The only trouble is, they are usually horrible!

They’re often freakishly hard to read: terrible terminology, windy sentence structures, swallowed verbs… Good thing we have computers to make things easy!

Listen to the abstract read aloud

We recommend listening to the abstract read aloud. Spoken language comes naturally to the human mind, but reading is hard.

You can read it aloud yourself, or you can have your computer do it for you. This is really powerful. (And great for unpleasant emails.) Here’s how to get a Mac to read text to you, here’s how to get a Windows PC to read text to you, here’s how to get an iPhone or iPad to do it, and here’s how to get an Android device to do it. 

You're welcome! But please note: the precise instructions may change when an OS updates, and we haven’t checked all of these; if they don’t work, just search YouTube for the latest.

Now, once you’ve listened to the abstract, you can use the AI to make it easier to understand.

Ask AI to summarize

You can ask AI to summarize your abstract. You can also ask it to rewrite it at a 5th-grade level.

But lately, we've been enjoying another trick:

I'm going to give you the abstract for a paper. Summarize it in sentences that are only 3 or 4 words long. (Use as many sentences as you'd like.) Here's the abstract: [paste it in]

And even more fun:

I'm going to give you the abstract for a paper. Summarize it multiple times using alliteration. The first time, make all the words start with one letter. The second time, make all the words start with another. And so on, two times. Here's the abstract: [paste it in]

Step 4: Download the Full Journal Articles

You may already have been able to download the full journal article from Google Scholar or Consensus. If so, yay!

Sci Hub

Q: How about accessing articles that are behind a paywall? That means I need to be a college student to access them, right?

Well…

The ethics of academic paywalls are enormously contentious (plenty of fights to find here!). The argument usually goes:

• Side A (most scholars): The purpose of academic research is to share it with as many people as possible, and the research universities that pay professors to produce it are publicly funded, so it doesn’t make sense for random companies to be able to charge $150 for someone to see it.

• Side B (the companies): Ha ha ha, try to stop us.

And then one woman did. In 2011, a Kazakhstani programmer named Alexandra Elbakyan created “Sci Hub”, which takes articles… and makes them free for the public! This is the site that most journalists use to keep up to date with scholarship. She’s sometimes called “the pirate queen of science” and is pursued by the law. (If you want to learn more, the podcast RadioLab has a great episode on her.)

Q: If I were to use this not-perfectly-legal site to get articles, how could I do it?

Just go to the site (note: it changes URLs every once in a while, so if that link doesn’t work, Google “Sci Hub” to find its current location), and type in the DOI — remember that’s the “barcode” that each journal article has. Dollars to donuts, you’ll be able to locate it pretty quickly.

Step 5: Read the Articles

Q: OK, I've got through the abstract, but heavens-to-Betsy, how do I get through a whole article now?!

You could absolutely print the article out, crack open a highlighter, and begin reading the article, slowly and steadily. 

You have put a lot of work into selecting your articles, and the point of this program is to go into depth with your topic, so some quality time spent reading and analyzing academic articles is par for the course here.

However, if you're open to it, AI tools can help.

Summarize with LLMs

Q: Yes, I'm open to it. How can an LLM help me to read and understand journal articles?

If you have a paid version of ChatGPT, just click the + button to the left of where you type in your prompts and upload the journal article.

You can use the free version of Claude for this (with some limitations). Click the “paperclip” button (desktop/laptop) or the “paper upload” button (phone/tablet).

Then, ask questions of the article, such as:

What is the author's main argument?

What are they arguing against?

What evidence do they give in support of their argument?

Turn them into a debate

Q: Great, but this still feels a little too... academic *stifles yawn. Could I make it more interesting?

It’s so much easier to pay attention to a fight than to rambling. When an article is poorly written (and they’re nearly always poorly written), it feels more like rambling.

So… pick two articles and turn them into a debate!

First, get clear on whether the papers have a real disagreement or not:

Act as an expert in [your topic]. I've uploaded a few PDFs; I'd like you to list important disagreements between the papers. Do so in short sentences of 3–4 words each. Then explain each of those disagreements at a 5th-grade reading level. Afterwards, tell me if these are actual disagreements or just differences in focus.

(If it doesn’t find any actual disagreements, then go back and find some papers that have some. Of course, use your AI to help!)

When you’ve found some, ask the AI to imagine a debate between the authors:

Please script a debate between the lead authors of each paper. Give each a different personality, and have each speak in casual sentences. At the end, have one of them storm off the stage.

NotebookLM

Q: That was fun! Any other suggestions for AI tools?

Why yes, actually. NotebookLM.

Shelley has found NotebookLM to be great at analyzing articles.

Again, you’ll have to sign up for a free account. There are paid options available, but I've managed to get everything I need on the free plan.

Upload your PDF articles as “sources” and then you can ask it questions about the papers you’ve uploaded. It will answer based on the information in your sources, and you can toggle your various sources on or off. For example:

• What is the author’s main thesis?

• Am I correct that Egan is critiquing both the “Tyler rationale” and the critics of that rationale?

• Compare and contrast the arguments of the two authors.

It’s got some neat “presets” — so at the click of a button, it can generate a Study Guide, FAQ, Timeline, or Briefing Document for you. I find the Briefing Document very handy.

My favorite part of NotebookLM is its Audio Overview feature. It makes a captivating podcast out of the (let’s be honest, dry) journal article(s) you’ve uploaded. By default, it’s a two-person podcast, spoken by AI voices. It’s not perfect, but I kinda love it! 😍

Step 6: Re-read and Analyze the Articles

In the Transformation Phase of our LiD Quest (Weeks 7-9), we’ll be giving you more ideas on how to use the knowledge and insights you’ve gained from your journal articles to create something new — your own products and evidence of learning.

But for now, read and re-read your articles and use the insights you uncover to answer your research questions. If more questions come up (and trust us, they will), make a note of them for possible future investigation.

You’re really learning in depth now.