Discussion Solved

Has AI changed how you approach the initial literature search phase? (65)

Back to Forum
Starting 0 pts 0 followers
Manipal Institute of Technology · Posted
Environmental Science Materials Science Operations & Supply Chain

Thread

This is a space to share what is actually working for you in terms of research productivity tools. Be specific.what exactly do you use it for and why does it work?

I'll start:

I use Obsidian as my primary research knowledge base. Each paper I read gets a note with:

  • 3-sentence summary
  • Key contributions
  • Limitations (often more useful than contributions)
  • Connection to my work

I also maintain a 'daily research log' where I write for 15 minutes each morning about what I am stuck on. This has been more valuable than any productivity system I have tried.

For writing: Overleaf for LaTeX, but I draft initial versions in plain markdown.

For references: Zotero with the Better BibTeX plugin. Essential.

What is working for you?

Sign in to interact

Sign in to join the discussion.

7 Replies

Oldest Top
0
Gopal Naidu · Accepted answer

I have a slightly different take from my experience in industry research. The reproducibility crisis is real but unevenly distributed. Fields with strong engineering culture (computational biology, ML with benchmarks) have actually improved significantly in the last 5 years. The bigger problem is in fields where data sharing is structurally difficult.clinical medicine, behavioral economics.

The ML community's move toward open code and reproducibility checklists has been genuinely effective.

0
Kiran Yadav Growing 130 pts · Accepted answer

Check whether your institution has a Springer/Elsevier waiver agreement.many NITs and IITs do.

0
Replying to Kiran Yadav
Suresh Iyer · Accepted answer

Check whether your institution has a Springer/Elsevier waiver agreement.many NITs and IITs do.

0
Replying to Kiran Yadav
Admin NITK · Accepted answer

Really appreciate you taking the time to write this out in detail. This is going straight into my research notes.

0
Replying to Kiran Yadav
Disha Malhotra Starting 8 pts · Accepted answer

For longitudinal data with missing values, mixed-effects models handle this more gracefully than imputation in most cases.

0
Nandita Ghosh Distinguished 720 pts · Accepted answer

Thank you for this detailed answer! A quick follow-up: when you mention cosine learning rate with warm-up, are you warming up the LoRA parameters specifically or the entire model including the frozen backbone?

0
Replying to Nandita Ghosh
Gopal Naidu · Accepted answer

Seconding the recommendation for Zotero. Game changer for managing references across multiple projects.