Comparative and cumulative

Read in context of other writing and never just one text in isolation. (“Read literatures, not papers.”)

Academic reading means never reading just one thing. Academic readers don’t read papers, they read literatures. And they do not just read papers and books one after the other, they are reading them in a comparative manner.

Just like with individual papers or chapter, academics are also not reading the multiple texts in a linear way. The same purpose-driven strategy and non-linearity that works well for individual texts applies to a collection of texts – perhaps even more strongly.

The way academic readers approach a new problem will depend on their existing familiarity with the field. They may start by collecting papers based on a key-word search and then read abstracts or introductions to some. This will lead to a better familiarity with the key concepts and problems. They will then proceed to read some in more detail and reread others in a new light.

At the end of the process, they will have a deep sense of familiarity with their field. They will have also used interaction (both written and in-person) with authors of the readings to develop a personal connection to their subject. It is not insignificant that much of what many successful academics read was written by somebody they know or they talked about with someone who knows them. This is not just a matter of personal familiarity but also a sense of the writers’ purpose, their intellectual history, connections to the field and the reader themselves.

The reader is also more accountable to the writer and may choose a deeper strategy.

Choosing the Approach

We should never expect our reading to end with one book or one paper. This means that the same strategic selection academic readers apply to individual readings needs to apply to entire literatures.

Nobody should expect to approach their field in the same way they approach reading their favourite fiction series. They will need to read widely before they read deeply to get a sense of the overall shape of the field. Combine preliminary surface reading with deep reading and cycle through as they develop.

The same strategies that apply to reading individual readings apply across readings, as well.

Choosing Tools

Most default tools for reading do not take into account the purposefulness of academic reading. They focus on opening and presenting individual files and leave all the comparative work up to the reader. This is one of the reasons why many people still print some of their readings.

Only recently have some tools such as MarginNote and LiquidText pay attention to this aspect of reading by allowing the combination of individual files into a single reading project.

Equally, the latest version of Zotero has integrated notes that can be organised across individual reading.

Readwise.io is another tool that allows reviewing and connecting notes across a number of readings.

Their integrations with notetaking apps such as Obsidian or Notion further enables this broader approach to reading.

Many e-readers, on the other hand, limit their ability to organise multiple readings to folders.

Readers do have recourse to using tools such as Calibre for the management of e-books but these are often not ideal when it comes to combining ebooks, academic papers and do not take into account needs such as reference management. Reference managers, on the other hand, are often not aware of the breadth of hardware tools readers may be using to read and annotate their texts.

Equally, publishers of online texts often build complex systems for people to read multiple readings within their catalogue but do not take into account that no literature is confined to a single publisher.

The overarching implication is that when choosing a reading tool, the academic reader will need to think about the workflow of getting multiple files to it and retrieving the notes in a way that can be brought together in a knowledge management context. This will include some compromises and inefficiencies.