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How to start being a proactive scientist and research on your own?

Introduction

Congratulations, you have been accepted in that first postgraduate degree that you wanted so much and for which you studied like never before in your life, now all the glamor have passed away and you are working with a real researcher on a subject of the most interesting and challenging. It is likely that you did not have much influence on that first research topic but as you progress you will want to satisfy your own curiosity, but, where do you start from?

Web of Science

Thousands of scientific articles are published every day that may be of your interests. However, it is not feasible that you can read all of them. Fortunately, there are tools that allow you to select the ones that could help you the most in your research. The main one is Web of Science, which allows you to select articles by topic, number of citations, impact factor and, even by country. The recommendation is to select the articles with the highest citations and impact factor, unless the topic is very close to yours.

Start reading

Before you start deep reading each article you selected, do a brief read, just focus on the hypotheses and the results, remember to take notes about what each article is about and keep the references. My recommendation is to make worksheets since you can use them for future research and they will save you a lot of problems when you are writing your thesis or an article.

Extra tip

I strongly recomendo you to use a bibliography manager, like Mendeley, or at least a keep updated a .bib file (in case you use LaTeX as a word processor). These managers will also help you a lot when it comes to sharing your discoveries in the form of articles or even books.

I would like to have known these tips when I started the master's degree. They are not written in stone, so, if you can complement them, add others, or even refute them, I invite you to do so in the comments and even write to me to put them in future publications.