In 2019 I took part in the #100papers challenge. The idea is that you aim to read (fully) 100 scientific papers in a year.
As I understand it, the challenge was born from the #365papers challenge. Some fools well-intentioned folks aim for averaging a paper a day for a year, and others thought “I’ll be lucky if I manage a third of it”. With both #365papers and #100papers, the idea is that you’ll commit to reading more if you’re publicly tracking it, and maybe also read more widely. I knew that #365papers would not be achievable for me, but #100papers might have been within my grasp (spoilers, it wasn’t).
I really like setting myself challenges. I’ve done a variety of photography and reading challenges over the years. Tracking the papers that I read on Twitter is innately appealing to me. I also wanted to put a potted summary or key outcome from each paper onto my tweets to force me to read the papers instead of cheating the essence of the challenge by skimming.
I have a pretty good work-life balance. I set aside a day a week to devote to research and I manage to keep that day protected about 60% of the time I’d say. How many papers did I read in their entirety in 2019?
40. I read 40 papers cover to cover.
I have some thoughts about this exercise. Firstly, I don’t think this is The Way to read papers. Something I noticed about reading whole papers was how pointless it often is. I teach students to be selective about how they approach papers, and when I was trying to find out how someone set up a study or I wanted an overview of a particular field, I wasn’t sitting down to read a whole paper, I was flicking to the relevant parts of various papers. So my first big takeaway is that reading whole papers isn’t something that I would prioritise over strategic paper skimming.
With that being said, there is something quite meditative and indulgent about reading a whole paper. There were some very fun papers like Jenny Scoles’ one on messy boundary objects where the narrative itself is enjoyable.
(There was also this deeply enjoyable rant where you could feel the authors’ visceral hatred of the right-brain-thinking myth.)
And I also really liked having the Twitter thread of all the papers I’d read, and the ability to jump back into that thread to share with people was massively useful. Bauer et al 2017, alongside reading Invisible Women, has changed my research practice quite considerably this year:
The performative aspect of talking about the papers I’m reading online was also interesting. I think you can track what projects I was working on with this twitter thread. You can see when I started reading up on our Widening Participation cluster for example, and I like some of the conversations the spawned from the thread.
In 2020, I’m probably not going to do the challenge again, but I’ll certainly be posting a papers thread, maybe #paperswotiread or something along those lines. The target of 100 fully read papers is not feasible for me, and if its not feasible for me, I’m not comfortable advertising it to those academics who may be following me. I’ve been thinking a lot this year about how I model what I view as ‘good’ academic practice, and I’m trying to make positive choices. So I’ll be doing something like this in 2020, just without the targets.
