Reading the Literature

Suggested Approach

It's crucial to keep up-to-date with the academic literature. Here's a recommended approach:
  • Set up a Google Scholar alert for authors and keywords related to your research
  • Use a smartphone app like  Researcher  to curate suggestions and regularly flip through the titles, bookmarking anything interesting to check out later.
It's not expected (or remotely possible!) to be perfectly up-to-date on everything being published, but some active effort is better than none.
For literature searches on previously published work:
  • Use  Google Scholar 
  • Explore the literature through citation networks via tools like  Connected Papers  or  ResearchRabbit 

Remote Access

The easiest way to access journal articles off-campus:
  • Use the  ReadCube Papers browser extension 
  • Use the  GlobalProtect VPN 
  • Use the  Princeton University Library webpage  (best chance of success for getting access)

Recommended Journals

New journals keep appearing, so this list will surely be out-of-date soon. That said, here is an incomplete list of recommended journals:
  • General science journals:
  • Science
  • Nature
  • Nature Communications
  • Science Advances
  • General chemistry journals:
  • Nature Chemistry
  • Journal of the American Chemical Society
  • Chem
  • ACS Central Science
  • Angewandte Chemie International Edition
  • Chemical Science
  • JACS Au
  • Computational chemistry and computational materials science:
  • npj Computational Materials
  • Digital Discovery
  • Journal of Chemical Theory and Computation
  • Journal of Chemical Information and Modeling
  • Materials journals:
  • Nature Materials
  • Matter
  • Advanced Materials
  • Chemistry of Materials
  • ACS Materials Letters
  • ACS Materials Au
  • Journal of Materials Chemistry A
  • Molecular Systems Design and Engineering
  • Catalysis journals:
  • Nature Catalysis
  • ACS Catalysis
  • Chem Catalysis
  • Catalysis Science and Technology
  • ChemCatChem
  • Journal of Catalysis
  • Physical chemistry journals:
  • Journal of Physical Chemistry Letters
  • Journal of Physical Chemistry C
  • Journal of Chemical Physics
  • Physical Chemistry Chemical Physics
  • Energy journals:
  • Nature Energy
  • Energy and Environmental Science
  • ACS Energy Letters
  • Chemical engineering journals:
  • Nature Chemical Engineering
  • Chemical Engineering Journal
  • ACS Engineering Au
  • Computation and machine learning journals:
  • Nature Computational Science
  • Nature Machine Intelligence
  • Machine Learning: Science and Technology
  • Reviews and perspectives:
  • Nature Reviews Materials
  • Chemical Reviews
  • Chemical Society Reviews
  • Trends in Chemistry
  • Accounts of Chemical Research
  • Accounts of Materials Research
  • Data and Software journals:
  • Scientific Data
  • Journal of Open Source Software
  • Pre-print servers:
  • ChemRxiv
  • arXiv