Conversation

When I was a green young researacher in grad school, my instincts for lit searches were terrible. I'd look up 100 papers or 10 books before I found a single average-value idea I could use. Now I'm much better. Example from just now...
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I had this vague instinct that there was something about Alice in Wonderland and Lewis Carroll's thinking in general that was relevant to my current thinking about time. So I checked out a random collection of Carroll expert essays on Alice edited by Howard Bloom.
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Replying to
Not sure quite how to formalize how I navigate literature, but I think my hit rate now is closer to 50% than the 1% it used to be.
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One reason I'm much better now is of course not skill at all, but leaving academia. I can ignore the whole "cover your ass/pay tribute" category of citations and only go looking for what I actually need to make my own arguments easier/better. Publish or perish = bad lit search.
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