The first challenge to my 30in30 research reading project is deciding what to read, which leads directly to deciding where to start in the literature that I’ve accumulated. Modern technology has allowed me to very easily accumulate a massive backlog of papers, chapters and books to read. I use Feedly to track journal table of contents for around 35 journals. There, I’ve flagged easily over a hundred articles for “Read later”. I also currently have around 40 open tabs in my browser pointing to various articles. And, I also have a folder on my desktop called “Papers to Read” containing 334 files.

I collect or flag papers that are directly relevant to the research we do, but I also flag papers of broader interests. And when your interests span soil science, biogeochemistry, environmental science, R coding and data science, etc. – that’s a lot of papers. Some papers get flagged for teaching purposes as well. I’m a sucker for a nice color figure in a synthesis paper that I can use in class – either having students read it themselves, or for me to integrate into a lecture. Clearly, my ability to collect papers of interest far exceeds my ability, time, energy, focus, discipline, etc. to actually read them.

This is a well-recognized phenomenon that has been written about: Scientific literature: Information overload (Landhuis, 2016, Nature 535:457–458 (21 July 2016) doi:10.1038/nj7612-457a) and How to tame the flood of literature (Gibney, 2014, Nature 513:129–130 (04 September 2014) doi:10.1038/513129a), for instance.

So where should I start? Chronological in order of when I collected the article, forward or reverse? Chronological order of the articles themselves? Shortest articles first? Topically? … I suspect some kind of triage will be necessary because I can actually get started. Ideally, the 30in30 exercise will allow me to focus in on what to read for different purposes.