Standing on the Shoulders of Giants
summary
Claims that desk research adds high-value context quickly by combining targeted keyword searches, citation chaining and AI summarization; recommends spending a day or two for skim-level projects or more for deeper hypotheses. Uses Bing/ChatGPT to surface keywords, Semantic Scholar/ACM/Google Scholar/ResearchGate to do speed backward search and feed forward search, reads abstract→conclusion→results→methods, and stores tagged notes in Google Sheets. Outcome: faster, hypothesis-driven session guides, cited KPIs and stronger design rationales verified across thousands of articles.
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chapters (11)
- 0:00Introduction to desk research
- 1:55Why desk research matters
- 7:00Standing on shoulders of giants
- 8:25Minimizing desk research effort
- 12:43Desk research with limited time
- 16:58Desk research as supplementary method
- 21:11Searching efficiently for sources
- 25:26Reading sources strategically
- 29:24Maximizing project quality
- 38:59Maximizing desk research quality
- 47:52Recap and Q&A
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