Hi all,

Those in the Lit Review stage or past that stage, can you please throw some light on the average number of journals you seriously follow? Especially those in interdisciplinary subjects....for instance, anyone in the social sciences knows how much the overlaps are with other social sciences, and how very many journals there are...

So, how many in total, and how widely outside your field/discipline do you read journals? I absolutely understand this is gonna be an average but I was just skimming through my own mind map of fields and journals and am getting pretty lost!

cheers folks!

I don't really read journals per say, rather articles. Obviously there are 2 or 3 big ones in my field that I look at when trying to write something up for publication. However, most of my reading comes from google scholar searches. I am a social scientist so I probably have references for hundreds of different journals - acorss many different social science subjects, e.g sociology, economics, psychology, management.

I don't think of lit review as being a phase, rather a continuous process. I read journals, conference papers and things from the internet regularly, a little each day. I think doing it solidly would be very boring for me!

And, at the risk of being pedantic, I think it is more relevant to talk about an interdisciplinary PhD topics rather than interdisciplinary subjects. My topic is 'computer-aided knitwear design', my supervisor is a computer scientist, but as well as articles from computer science (case-based reasoning) I sometimes read ones in knitwear, engineering/design, and psychology. Many articles in computer science are completely irrelevant to me.

I absolutely get the interdisciplinarity of topics! What I had meant was "new on the block" subjects, for instance media and communications studies, which are "at birth" a contributed effort by sociology, psychology, anthropology, political science, economics and literature.