Conjugated polymer nanoparticles to optical control living cells activity (Gobbo Federico, PhD-PHYS )
The project of my PhD is to stimulate living cells using visible/near infrared light. Since cells are transparent to light, an optical transducer is necessary. I’m working on the characterization of different bio-interfaces between cells and conjugated polymer nanoparticles.
First research: “organic nanoparticles”. I found 62 000 papers on web of science (the number of papers is bigger in the other databases), because organic nanoparticles are widely used in many different fields of technologies, not only to stimulate living cells.
For this reason, I completely changed the approach. I searched “cells light stimulation”. I found 8.000 papers, and Iooking at the categories I noticed that this field is very interdisciplinary. I wasn’t interested in papers too specific based on approaches completely different from the one that I use. 
I added key words to restrict the results of my research. I tried “biomaterials”, “organic”, “nanoparticles”. In this way I found less than 200 papers for each research.
I read the titles of the papers, and the majority of them are very interesting for my research.
But I think that it’s important to know also the competitive approaches to make cells light sensitive, and their advantages or disadvantages with respect to the strategy that I use.
I searched again “cells light stimulation”, but this time I searched only for the review articles. In this way, I can include in my work the alternative approaches without reading thousands of papers.
Now I have to decide how much investigate in details the reviews that I found. I should select the reviews that are more interesting and look at their bibliographies to find new papers that could be useful for this work.
Today I only searched in Web of Science, I could repeat the research on other databases.