How to Build a January Reading Plan for a New Research Project

A January reading plan is a short, dated schedule that turns a vague new project into a defined reading scope, a documented search, a screened set of papers, and a first synthesis you can show a supervisor or advisor by the end of the month. You build it by fixing your question and eligibility criteria first, then searching, deduplicating, screening in stages, and writing a short evidence memo. The plan is ready when someone else could rerun your search from your notes and reach the same core reading list.

This guide is written for students and early-career researchers starting a course paper, a thesis chapter, or a first manuscript, often after a winter break when notes and PDFs have piled up. It gives you a sequence with checkpoints, a worked example, a reusable checklist, and clear rules for when to stop or escalate.

January plans fail most often because the reader starts collecting PDFs before deciding what the project is. Spend the first session sorting yourself into one of these states.

• Cold start. You have a topic sentence and little else. Your first job is to convert the topic into a question with inclusion and exclusion criteria.
• Warm but scattered. You have a folder of papers from last term but no structure. Your first job is to deduplicate and tag what you already have.
• Feedback-driven restart. A supervisor or reviewer has told you the scope is wrong or the literature is thin. Your first job is to rewrite the criteria before searching again.
• Cleanup mode. You are finishing one project and starting another. Your first job is to separate the two reading sets so old material does not contaminate the new scope.

Write one sentence describing your state and one sentence describing what "done" looks like on 31 January. For example: "I am in feedback-driven restart; done means a screened list of 25 core papers and a two-page memo on methods gaps." That sentence is your anchor for every later decision.

The Cochrane Handbook's guidance on searching for studies starts from eligibility criteria: you define what counts as a relevant study before you search, then build the search from those criteria. This is the single most useful habit to borrow in January, even for a small course paper. A search built from criteria is reproducible; a search built from whatever you type at midnight is not.

Turn your topic into four lines:

1. Population or object of study — what or who is being studied.
2. Intervention, method, or phenomenon — the thing whose effects or behavior you care about.
3. Outcome or question type — what you want to know (effect, mechanism, prevalence, method comparison).
4. Boundaries — date range, language, publication type, and settings you will exclude.

Then write your inclusion and exclusion criteria as short bullet lists. Keep them visible in the same document as your search log so you cannot quietly change them mid-month without noticing.

Checkpoint 1 (end of day 2): You have a one-paragraph question, a criteria list, and a named deliverable for the month. If you cannot state an exclusion criterion, your scope is probably still too broad.

Cochrane recommends combining free-text terms with subject headings and using multiple sources rather than a single database. In practice, that means building a term table before you open any search box.

Run the same concept blocks across at least two sources. When you use WisPaper search to find academic papers, keep the term table beside it so each query maps back to a concept rather than to a whim. If you prefer a public entry point for finding papers, the WisPaper Scholar Search page serves the same purpose.

Checkpoint 2 (end of week 1): Your term table is complete, you have run each concept block in at least two sources, and every search has a date and a hit count.

Cochrane's guidance is explicit that the search process should be documented, and PRISMA 2020 provides reporting templates, including flow-diagram templates, for transparent reporting of search, selection, and synthesis. You do not need a full systematic review apparatus for a January reading plan, but you do need the same spine: a log of what you searched, what you kept, and why.

Keep three artifacts in one folder:

• Search log. One row per query: source, exact string, date, hits.
• Screening sheet. One row per unique record: title, year, decision (include, exclude, maybe), reason.
• Reading list. The included papers with a one-line note on why each matters.

If your project will eventually be reported formally, borrow the PRISMA 2020 flow-diagram structure early: records identified, duplicates removed, records screened, records excluded with reasons, studies included. Filling it in as you go is far cheaper than reconstructing it later.

Cochrane recommends deduplicating records and screening in stages, and it also notes that multiple reports may describe a single study, which should be linked rather than counted as separate evidence. Both habits matter in January, when the temptation is to treat every PDF as a separate finding.

A workable three-stage screen:

1. Title and abstract. Fast decisions against your criteria. Record a reason for every exclusion.
2. Full text. Confirm the paper actually meets the criteria. Many will not.
3. Linkage. Group multiple reports of the same study or dataset under one entry so your count reflects distinct evidence, not distinct PDFs.

When you save or upload papers, organize them in My Library so your included set lives in one place rather than across downloads and desktop folders. Zotero-style collections and tags offer a parallel approach: one item can sit in multiple project groupings without duplication, tags can describe topic, method, or status, and saved searches update automatically. Whichever tool you use, the rule is the same — one canonical entry per paper, with tags that match your criteria.

Checkpoint 3 (end of week 2): Duplicates are removed, every record has a decision and a reason, and linked reports are grouped.

A reading list is not a synthesis. By the third week you should be extracting, not just collecting. For each included paper, capture four fields: the question it asks, the method it uses, the finding it reports, and the gap or limitation it names. Those four fields let you write paragraphs instead of annotated bibliography entries.

This is also where a question-answering step helps. If you have uploaded your included papers to My Library, Library QA lets you ask questions based on those papers, which is useful for checking whether a claimed gap appears across your set or only in one paper. Keep the answers as leads to verify against the source text, and record which paper each claim came from.

If your January project is a longer literature review rather than a short paper, Scholar Agent is built for longer research tasks in the literature review, inspiration, and reproduction areas. Use it after your criteria and screening sheet exist, not before — the criteria are what keep a long-running task pointed at your question.

Checkpoint 4 (end of week 3): You have a four-field extraction table for every included paper and a draft gap statement supported by at least three of them.

Suppose a master's student is revising a thesis chapter on remote-work productivity. The supervisor's feedback: the scope is too broad and the literature is thin on measurement methods.

Week 1 — criteria and search. The student narrows the question to how productivity is measured in remote-work studies, with boundaries of the last ten years and peer-reviewed empirical work. The term table pairs free-text synonyms ("remote work," "telework," "productivity," "performance measurement") with subject headings, and each block is run in two sources. The search log records six queries with dates and hit counts.

Week 2 — deduplicate and screen. Duplicates are removed, and the screening sheet records a reason for every exclusion. Several papers turn out to report the same survey; they are linked under one entry. The included set lands at 28 papers, organized in My Library with tags for method type and measurement approach.

Week 3 — extract and synthesize. The extraction table shows that most included studies rely on self-reported output measures, with a smaller group using objective logs. The gap statement writes itself: measurement choice varies widely, and few studies justify it.

Week 4 — verify and hand off. Before sending the memo, the student checks the reference list. TrueCite screens BibTeX against real academic databases to flag hallucinated references, which is a fast way to catch entries that crept in from notes or generated drafts. The memo goes to the supervisor with the search log, screening sheet, and extraction table attached.

Checkpoint 5 (end of month): The supervisor can read the memo, open the search log, and see exactly how the 28 papers were found and why each was kept.

The plan is ready when three tests pass. First, reproducibility: someone else could rerun your searches from the log and reach a similar core set. Second, traceability: every claim in your memo points to a specific included paper. Third, coverage: your gap statement rests on more than one paper, and you can name the studies on each side of it.

Stop and escalate when any of these occur:

• The criteria keep moving. If you have rewritten inclusion criteria three times in a week, take the current version to your supervisor before searching again.
• The included set is too small to synthesize. If screening leaves you with fewer papers than your gap statement needs, widen one boundary deliberately and log the change rather than searching randomly.
• The included set is unmanageably large. Tighten a boundary — date range, method, or population — and rerun, keeping the old log.
• A key paper is unavailable. Record it as a known gap in your memo rather than silently dropping it.
• Your draft cites sources you cannot locate. Run the reference list through citation screening before the memo goes out.

Cochrane also recommends rerunning searches before publication. For a January plan, the practical version is a scheduled re-run at the end of the month, logged like any other search, so your reading list reflects the literature as of your hand-off date.

Open a single document today and write the two anchor sentences: your starting state and your 31 January finish line. Then draft the four-line question and one exclusion criterion. That document becomes your search log, your screening sheet header, and your memo skeleton — and it is the difference between a January spent downloading PDFs and a January that ends with a defensible reading plan.

If you want a single place to start, the WisPaper homepage introduces it as an AI research assistant for finding, screening, organizing, and working with academic papers, and Research Projects is where you can create a new project to hold the work.