How to Research Any Topic - Deep-Dive like a PhD Student（原声文稿）

phone instead of working on that essay that is dusting off research might seem the exception and not the norm.

about the research process this can actually help us in daily life to become a little bit more observant.

years now as both a PhD student and now as a postdoctoral researcher this research process goes. So how do we come up with a good research question? How do we find the right literature?

resources, how do we know what we can trust or shouldn't trust and kind of learned when I told people about the research specific topics, that it's actually not as intuitive as I little bit about how I do research or how I would tackle a both in daily life and in my work.

So let's get straight course when you do research that you want to do is to start from general to specific.

So most of us have a mental health.

But this is very general and if you want to do research to be a little bit more specific and it's really helpful type of research you want to do.

So for example, little bit about mental health, you might want to narrow it down literature research, you are not just googling mental health question mark, and then you can narrow it down even further.

later development of psychiatric disorders?

as opposed to mental health as a general topic or just social economic status and mental health.

review basically will go and the better resources you will question over time.

So then the next step you want to do is what I call the literature hunt.

And this is really a very evolved process. So it will take a lot of time. So as I explained it, don't get scared. I don't think like, oh my God, that is way too much work.

But over time you will get quite good at it.

the right resources, because it does, yeah, resources.

So in general what I usually do when I have a start with the classic papers in that research field, recent review of the last five to ten years.

And again, that depends a little bit on the research field you're in, how fast it changes.

example, I know for neuroscience that, for example, nature is quite And I don't really think there is a way to decide this.

time, publish in those journals, and it's not necessarily that journals.

One thing to always look out for is if a journal is journals are.

And then I think you want to see where are quite hard to skip this step.

But in general, you can of course publishers such as Nature for example or HGP, which journals are trustworthy and which ones are not.

I would immediately go down to the citation field and then you already have a goldmine of information.

So So all of these papers I would put in a common reference manager.

This can be Sotero, Paperpal, or anything you want.

make maps between which authors are the most important and which papers are the main nodes of your knowledge network.

research rabbits, so they kind of do it for you, which is really nice.

And over time, then you will get this big graph like network with all the papers.

also realized that the real challenge is not just finding the information the dots and turning these scattered ideas into one common framework So in general, you now have this large knowledge web. But this is just your starting point.

backtrace citations. So who is citing whom?

then build out your knowledge network, basically You also want to forward trace the field You also want to see which other papers are citing this paper as well you can actually see which other papers cite your paper.

rabbit, for example, you can see which other papers are citing your paper.

And the thing is with this literature review is you want to make it really wide.

that talk about the question that you're researching.

an involved process and you will already find a lot of resources.

So, the more specific your question is, the less resources you will find.

otherwise this knowledge network will explode.

example, so terror or notion to really make everything that you're learning along this research process.

across resources and you also want to keep in where are the gaps, are there certain specific other papers that knowledge network over time is very complete.

So also, papers, you also want to keep a critical thinking mode by your professor, for example, and you just blindly But as you're doing research or finding papers, you resources you're selecting.

And the reason for that is that lot of research is limited.

So it might be that they're specific idea that has not been fully proven yet.

So you check for biases? So I check who funded it? Is it Big Pharma?

back of your head. Does the tone sound objective?

valid and not from a very biased point of view?

doesn't match the data or the introduction, is caused by chocolate but then when I see the paper that actually done only on mice so the headline should have actually mice and I think quite often authors or in popular tailored to yeah gather a little bit clicks or to make title. Also something to keep in mind is correlation versus causation.

the reason for that is that we often cannot manipulate directly human brains because that's not ethical.

So most of the studies we have to do are of interventions that we can do.

Also learn some that you should automatically flag, how do they deal with instead of real research, and all of these kind of topics.

a paper it's a very good sign if the research of their own studies and they will put that in the discussion for you.

limitations of the research, that's actually a good thing.

limitations is because research is so much at the edge experiments that need to be done to answer all the questions.

and guides you through the limitations of their work.

and then your question might be how do I start reading from this?

Or how do I start learning from this or cleaning information from this?

course or curriculum where you basically set out resources and I usually start from the top notes all the papers together you will see which ones are the top papers and we'll start reading that and for me that's quite easy you will go over and that can for example be before your notion template. So I do it in notion.

Again, you don't have to do it questions list, daily logs of what you've learned, what you've that you've read.

So just taking down a few snippets information.

So something that I really want to emphasize here is to try to like a mini lab book over time where you record what you read, what you've have as you're researching and try to note down time.

And I think the first questions that you have when you get interesting because those questions really show the eyes of what questions you had when you researched more about everything you're learning and all the questions you have.

So if you have this knowledge bank, try to create for chapter, a video script, a paper or a blog post.

I think you really start to consolidate it.

reading knowledge is not really a good way to truly get into a certain topic.

write a blog post, you don't have to publish knowledge into a coherent answer on the research question then the idea of active learning versus passive learning.

reading and just highlighting and just scrolling and teach what you've learned, you can also try to close everything you've done.

But I really think it is very important to quite good to create something out of it afterwards.

So to go from this research try to do at the end of every research session today, what makes it unclear, and what's my next step.

step or what do I still want to learn or where is the missing information.

And the reason for this is, over time, this really builds momentum.

from the previous day what is still missing, it's quite easy to follow up on that on the next day.

this really allows for your curiosity to kind of push which can take one year, two years, or even five years for also really start doubting yourself.

But I think if you note down questions you have over time, I think almost the questions that you find.

So I really hope that this research process your research as well.

And I'm just really curious, what are you love to tell a little bit about my research one time here on YouTube, but I always find it really complicated because I feel that the really want to talk about it online because I feel truth.

Whereas something with research that I always still so malleable.

So maybe what I'm actually showing Whereas I think online or also on YouTube it's very much this, do you think there's a good way to show research that we as scientists are still really unsure about?

in a way that doesn't claim any type of truth or validity?

I would be really curious, so let me know down in the comments below. And otherwise, I see you next week, bye!