Professional reading

One of the nice things about being on sabbatical is having a bit of time to do some professional reading. In my “normal” job, most of the work-related reading of research papers that I do is in my role as a reviewer … which means that sometimes (often?!) the papers I’m reading aren’t particularly useful or good … and immediately afterwards I have to write a review, which inevitably takes longer than I want!

I spent this afternoon trying to get my head around some published literature (which means that someone else has already decided that it is useful or good (although, in fact, this isn’t necessarily a guarantee!)), mainly so I can write a literature review and improve the framework for a paper I am working on. I have to confess that writing literature reviews is not one of my favourite tasks: I know it’s important to put your work in context, but the fun bit of a paper is the actual research you did, rather than everyone else’s foundations.

Anyway, it was good to have some uninterrupted time trying to grapple with the big ideas in what I was reading. The luxury of just being able to concentrate on one or two things and to be able to cross-reference ideas was such a change from what typically happens when I’m frantically trying to work on a paper in amongst the usual chaotic schedule of academic activity.

I need to do some more mulling though, since  I am still struggling to conceptualise the current paper. I don’t want to end up with something that isn’t useful or good! 🙁