Research Writing: How Our Memory Gets Buried Under Thousands of PDFs
After working in the same research area for a few years, I started running into a very mundane problem: I often remembered that I had read something relevant, but could no longer remember enough to search for it properly.
Take a chemistry example. Suppose I am writing about why doping improves photoluminescence in a perovskite system. Somewhere in my library, I vaguely remember a paper discussing a similar effect. I remember that it had something to do with defects, perhaps vacancies, perhaps non-radiative recombination.
So I start trying keywords:
dopant defect passivation perovskite
Too broad.
Mn vacancy perovskite
The results look closer, but still not quite right. One paper is about a different material system. Another uses Mn²⁺, but discusses luminescence tuning rather than the mechanism I remember.
The frustrating part is that I may actually have read the right paper already. It may even be sitting in my local...
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