Become more effective in researching any topic

Finding Sources

• First go to wikipedia and get a summary of the topic. Don’t trust wikipedia, but get the right keywords to look for and use the list of wikipedia citations as your baseline.
• Then search for the opposite view to your view immediately. Yes, it’s hard to update your brain this way, but just confirming your original view is a waste of your time.
  • E.g. If you are a bitcoiner and big supporter, search for “The Inefficiency of Bitcoin” or “The issues with Bitcoin mining”...
• Go to scholar.google.com, limit the articles by some recent years (if your topic could have changed recently).
  • Sources with more citations are generally better. Open a bunch of them.
• Most likely you will end on some user exclusion site like Elsevier (fuck Elsevier) or Jstor or similar. There, try your best locating “doi” id, e.g. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.econlet.2016.09.019.
• Take doi id and put it right in sci-hub.se searchbox
  • It will show you the result, e.g. https://sci-hub.se/https://doi.org/10.1016/j.econlet.2016.09.019
  • Use this link to donate BTC to Alexandra Elbakyan when you find a good article…
• Note that Elsevier injects tracking hashes in the pdf (and SciHub currently doesn’t clean those), so if you want to pass the files to someone else, then you need to run cleaner of the pdf.
  • You can use dangerzone.rocks or https://www.exiftool.org/
• For the sources make sure that those are credible (checklist) and ideally peer reviewed
  • Sidenote: No one actually reads academic journals, those are often used to suck money out of science, as a status flex and as a way to manipulate topics being discussed. That said they serve as a somewhat good filter, so take it as such. FYI: The model of journals is a source of constant rumble from scientists, but no major fix is in sight yet.

Analyzing sources

• So now you have a couple pdfs. For each PDF read the Abstract of the article. Like really read it, focus on understanding what it says. Then scroll all the way to the bottom to conclusions. If the article says things like “further research would be needed to confirm X”, or “we have not excluded bias Y”, then that’s a good sign. Put the article aside if it seems to be solid and useful.
• Go to the citations section and get an idea if there are some other articles that sound useful and add those to your backlog of articles to check.
• Now actually read through the papers that sound interesting and useful. Pay attention to details, try questioning all arguments put forward in the paper.
• If you are trying to quickly comprehend an essay, the trick is to read only the first sentence out of each paragraph.
  • This is possible, since the structure of an essay is generally following this structure
    • Intro paragraph
      • Background
      • The overall argument / thesis
    • Argument paragraphs [1..n]
      • The first sentence of a paragraph generally summarizes the argument made in the paragraph
      • Other sentences put forward evidence supporting this argument
      • Last sentence usually just rephrases the same argument
    • Conclusion paragraph
      • Repeats the overall argument and repeats some of the paragraph arguments
• If you are actually writing a research thesis based on this, then definitely read How to write a thesis by Umberto Eco. Even though there are now better tools it will make you appreciate the depth needed to do solid research. You can buy it and definitely don’t download it for free from https://b-ok.cc in PDF or e-reader formats.