How to find the papers you need to read - and avoid the ones you don't

"The challenge of staying up to date with the scientific literature has become a burden for everyone from students to senior investigators. In fields such as public health, annual publication counts now exceed half a million articles - more than 1,300 papers every day. Experienced researchers and early-career scientists alike report anxiety about falling behind and emphasize the importance of building efficient reading habits."

"Some have noted that the pressure to keep up has left many scientists increasingly reliant on social media and recommendation systems to find papers, rather than systematic reading. What's clear is that the difficulty of keeping up with the literature is no longer a niche problem, but one that cuts across disciplines, methodologies and seniority levels. As researchers at different stages of our scientific journeys - a PhD student, a mid-career investigator and a senior group leader - we, too, have faced this challenge."

"Here, we offer five complementary strategies to help you filter the literature and stay up to date on your research field. These are the strategies that we have found to be the most effective, and we hope that they will help others, too, whatever their field or career stage. Subscribe to what matters One of the simplest and most reliable ways to stay current is through journal table of contents (ToC) alerts."

Keeping up with scientific literature imposes a growing burden across career stages as publication volumes accelerate, producing anxiety and incomplete coverage. The difficulty spans disciplines, methodologies and seniority levels and has pushed many researchers toward social media and recommendation systems instead of systematic reading. Complementary strategies can filter literature, reduce information overload and help maintain currency in a research field. Effective approaches include curated journal table-of-contents alerts with filters for article types and direct links, prioritized subscriptions to reputable journals, curated digests, personalized filtering, and disciplined reading routines to evaluate and allocate attention efficiently.

Read at Nature