Choosing a project

For finding papers, my go-to tools are Pubmed and Google Scholar. The University Library also has other databases as well (PsycLit, PsychInfo, etc). I have a myNCBI account that I use to receive weekly emails of saved keyword searches. I will also look at "citing papers", Twitter feeds, ResearchGate threads, etc. Other less reputable sites like SciHub and LibGen can be helpful in finding pdfs, ebooks, etc. (but these sites may not be available via the campus network). Video platforms like the Journal of Visualized Experiments (JOVE) and YouTube have a lot of great resources as well.

Here is one example of an organized approach to reading and processing the papers that you have found, assuming that you will be spending 1 dedicated hour / day for 4 days / week (which is very reasonable for a doctoral student):

• Monday - Spend 1 hr finding papers. At first, your focus should be on review papers and maybe the original / "classic" empirical papers in the field. Later, you will want to focus on the brand new "cutting edge" empirical papers that just came out this week. Categorize each paper Low or High priority based on a quick skim of the title and abstract and its relevance to your overall idea(s). Shoot for finding ~10-12 potential High priority papers.
• Tuesday - Spend 1 hr going over 5-6 papers (~10m each) to gain a basic understanding of the concept (if it's a review), algorithm/model, problem, and data, the literature context (what gap is being filled). Record some very brief notes (3-4 sentences) in your reference manager for each paper.
• Wednesday - Same as Tuesday with the remaining 5-6 High priority papers that you found on Monday.
• Thursday - Spend about an hour getting deep into the most interesting High priority paper that you've processed so far. Take extensive notes about how this paper is relevant to your project, the methods that were used, the results, etc.
• Friday - Post the pdf of the paper along with its notes to the Lab's Microsoft Teams Papers channel.

You will need to "officially" choose a project by the time you take Research Methods class in the Fall quarter of your 2nd year. If you have followed the advice above (to fully read / process at least 1 paper per week), you should have thoroughly read and summarized ~50 papers by this point.

As we will discuss in Research Methods class, your project should be relatively simple and elegant, with usually no more than 3 "specific aims".