ABSTRACT
On the other hand, if you are embarking on experimental work in a specific area, you will need to be fully versed in the current state of knowledge. It will be important to read as widely as possible, not only about the background but also about the latest developments that might affect your work. The search strategies discussed in Chapter 1 will help you to locate a starting point. If you want to be really sure that you have covered all the relevant published work in the field, you will have to search quite exhaustively – and often exhaustingly. Spending a whole day searching for papers in the library can be pretty boring, certainly more so than querying a database for half an hour. Nevertheless, it is a very good investment if it will save you wasting six months on unnecessary experiments.
