I don’t like reading

I love reading, but I hate reading academic literature. I even hate reading my own papers.

I guess that is probably a shared feeling by most researchers. My supervisor told me after I’ve been there for 2 or so months that I am quite good at using tools and doing things, tools being software and coding, though I really should be reading more. The reality was, I barely read anything when I was writing those two papers that I mentioned. The only works I referred upon were my supervisor’s previous work, and some general background.

Since I am not Einstein, and this is not an annus mirabilis, my papers were found not credible when reviewed by my supervisor, who told me to do a proper literature review on both. This I did begrudgingly, and in a hap-hazard manner.

It was not until my third paper, when I collaborated with a post-doc that I realized the importance of having a proper literature survey at the beginning of the paper. The justification for the research, and the proof of improvement over other’s work is what makes my result worthwhile. It is almost assumed that what we did was correct in isolation, but the relevance of it, is much more questionable. I believe the attention paid to the first few sections of the paper really strengthened it.

When confronted with the shear number of people doing seemingly exactly what I am trying to do, and doing a much better job at it, many years ago, It is hard to get that motivation to keep reading. It is in finding out what they are missing, and everyone always misses something (Einstein missed gravity in his special relativity, didn’t he?), that I find joy. Though aside from a few real honest guys, most researchers try to hide the limitations in their work under fancy abstracts and titles, making it hard to pick them out.

I think there is a general comfort level associated with reading past research. I believe that once a saturation point is reached in the number of related papers read, adding one more to the pile won’t induce mass brain trauma. Once I can spot the same authors being cited by other familiar names, I start realizing the community isn’t as big as I thought initially.

Lastly, and perhaps the most difficult task, is to understand papers demonstrating new mathematics (in application with structural engineering). This one I still have not figured out. A typical course in, say non-linear continuum mechanics, starts out with the introduction of index notation and tensor calculus before going into the derivation of the 4th order constitutive tensor. What I find in almost all papers of such sort, there is not enough English to explain the maths, there is zero background knowledge, as if the maths speak for itself. Maybe that is the case for researchers who have worked in the same field for decades, but how does a person entering the field even begin to understand the theorems, the corollaries, and the proofs behind them all. Adding to this issue, there is sometimes a page limitation on conference or journal papers. Under such limitation, I don’t blame the guys for dedicating more real estate to their work than on the background… Just difficult, that’s all.