Search across guide titles, topics, keywords, and content throughout the Researcher's Field Guide.
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Keeping up with a research field does not mean reading every paper it produces. A sustainable system monitors several useful signals, screens new research quickly, and reserves close reading for work that could actually change what you know or do.
Read Guide →Researchers, journals, and topics provide different routes to new research. Following topics usually gives the broadest coverage, while selected researchers and journals can add useful signals that topic searches may miss.
Read Guide →A preprint can give you early access to important research, but being new does not make it important or reliable. Evaluate its relevance, methods, evidence, transparency, version history, and publication status before deciding how much attention it deserves.
Read Guide →The newest study may update what we know, but publication date alone does not determine evidential importance. Evaluate what the study adds, how well it was conducted, and how it fits the wider body of evidence.
Read Guide →An important study appearing during peer review does not automatically require immediate contact with the journal. First determine whether it materially affects your claims, methods, interpretation, or conclusions, then respond proportionately to the manuscript's review stage.
Read Guide →A major study appearing after acceptance does not automatically require reopening your manuscript. Assess whether it materially changes the accuracy or interpretation of the accepted paper, then contact the journal when a substantive change may be warranted.
Read Guide →Continuous literature monitoring is justified when important new evidence appears frequently enough that waiting for occasional search updates could affect research or decisions. It should be systematic and sustainable, not literally constant.
Read Guide →A literature review cannot remain permanently current in a rapidly changing field. The defensible goal is to search systematically up to a documented cutoff, monitor consequential developments, and report clearly what evidence was and was not incorporated.
Read Guide →Grey literature includes research and other evidence produced outside conventional academic and commercial publishing. Learn what counts as grey literature and when searching for it can materially improve a literature review.
Read Guide →Theses, dissertations, reports, and working papers are scattered across repositories, specialist databases, organizational websites, and search engines. Learn where to search and how to find documents that conventional journal databases may miss.
Read Guide →Conference abstracts can reveal relevant studies before or without full publication, but their limited reporting makes them difficult to evaluate. Whether to include them depends on your review question, eligibility criteria, and intended use of the evidence.
Read Guide →A conference abstract with no identifiable full paper should not simply disappear from your review. Trace the study carefully, seek additional information where appropriate, and decide what the abstract can support based on your review criteria and the information actually available.
Read Guide →Government and institutional reports can contain valuable research evidence, including surveys, evaluations, administrative analyses, and technical studies. Their authority as documents, however, should not be confused with the methodological strength of the evidence they contain.
Read Guide →Preprints can provide timely access to research before journal peer review, particularly in rapidly developing fields. Whether you should include them depends on your review purpose, eligibility criteria, and how carefully you manage their provisional and versioned status.
Read Guide →When a preprint has subsequently become a peer-reviewed journal article, the journal version will usually be the appropriate source to cite. But the preprint should not automatically disappear when it contains unique information or differs meaningfully from the published paper.
Read Guide →When a preprint and its published paper report different results, do not automatically discard one version or assume peer review explains the change. Compare the study versions systematically to determine what changed, why it matters, and which result should inform your interpretation.
Read Guide →Studies can exist long before, or without ever becoming, journal articles. Learn how to trace unpublished and ongoing research through registries, conference records, repositories, study authors, sponsors, and other sources.
Read Guide →Clinical trial registries can reveal completed studies that never became journal articles and may sometimes provide results themselves. Learn when registry searching matters, what to look for, and how to interpret what you find.
Read Guide →Regulatory documents can contain studies, outcomes, adverse-event data, and methodological detail that journal articles omit. Learn why these sources matter and when they are worth searching.
Read Guide →Technical reports can provide methodological and implementation detail that a journal article compresses or omits. More detail is useful, but it does not automatically make the report more rigorous.
Read Guide →Some organizations conduct substantial research but rarely publish it in academic journals. Finding their work requires searching organizations, repositories, websites, references, and research networks rather than relying only on bibliographic databases.
Read Guide →Local and internationally indexed journals may differ in visibility, audience, and external vetting, but those differences should not become shortcuts for judging individual studies. Evaluate journal practices and study quality separately.
Read Guide →Local evidence may be distributed across theses, government reports, institutional repositories, technical documents, and other grey literature rather than conventional journals. Finding it requires searching the organizations and systems that produce the evidence, not only bibliographic databases.
Read Guide →A publisher paywall does not necessarily mean the paper is inaccessible or that you need to pay for it yourself. Several legitimate routes may provide the same paper through your library, an open-access copy, a repository, interlibrary loan, or the author.
Read Guide →An accepted manuscript has passed peer review but is not necessarily identical to the final published article. For many reading purposes it may contain the research you need, but post-acceptance changes, corrections, and citation details can sometimes make the version of record important.
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