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Going Paperless in Academia
Mike | Mar 8 2007
I was wondering if any academics out there have gone paperless, and how they might manage with the stack of journal articles I'm sure most of the rest of us have piled on their desk. My reasons for wanting to go paperless are rather obvious: I just have incredibly tall stacks of papers that I can't cross-reference very effectively, and filing is a nightmare (I could probably fill an entire drawer in under 6 months). Not to mention that I can never find what I'm looking for when it becomes critical. I've been using Papers (by mekentosj) to archive and organize my articles, and that has been working out pretty well (although I hope they add some robust tagging support soon). So my main question for those of you out there is how you keep track of any note-taking you do on papers? What I'd really like is an effective way to highlight - make text annotations - draw pretty arrows/circles - curse out my competitors - you know, smart people stuff. Ideally I could do this while reading it on screen, but there's also something romantic about pen and paper (my GTD system is analog) - so I may just annotate the pdf after the fact. Does anyone do this regularly as part of their workflow? Could you recommend a good tool for all these annotations (for os x)? Or worst case scenario - do you have a really great filing system for academic papers? Just about everyone I know uses the stack-it-until-it-falls-over method. Cheers. 13 Comments
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 Here's a late reply as...Submitted by CrzyMke on March 27, 2007 - 11:42am.
Here's a late reply as I think I may have fine-tuned my system. But alas, knowing me, it may well change again and again. I do think that this is scaleable, though, which is what I wanted. It's also heavily Mac dependent, so I apologize for those PC users out there. 1) Papers: I already mentioned, but I love this program - it really fills a niche in my work flow. I use it for the majority of my pubmed searching, as well as viewing and organizing my entire library - I'm sure you End Note users can use it as well. This is really my front end for the most part - I keep track of authors and journals here, as well as sorting out papers of relevance. In the notes section I have a direct link to the Journler entry. . . 2) Journler: A great donationware journaling and note-taking program for Mac users. This is where I keep most of my typed up notes. In case I want to search for papers through Journler itself I title the entry with the name of the paper I've read, and set the creation date to the date of publication. The category is "Paper" so I can have a smart folder with all of my notes on the side bar. For Tags I include First author, last author, journal, and usually one other (Methods, Resource, etc). This way I can create nested smart folders if I want to pull up my notes on a single author or from a single year/time period. At the top of the entry I include a link to the Papers entry (could work just as well directly to the PDF, but this is a more elegant solution for me). Then I take notes from every subsection of the papers (intro, various results areas, conclusion), or based on the figures themselves - whichever is most appropriate. 3) Articles: Now I have two stacks of papers - Papers to be read, and Papers to have notes taken. The to be read pile travels with me (if its small enough) for when I have a few minutes to take a peek at. The To have notes taken pile is usually all marked up from my read through. Once it moves out of the second pile it either gets filed if its really critical to hold on to, or tossed in the recycling bin. I'm really happy with this solution since everything is indexed for ready searching, and I can harness both programs readily for searching what I'm looking for. Journler has several powerful export options too, so it is easily moved to another platform (even paper!). I hope you guys like it - and that it helps someone out there - even if it is a niche position I'm in. » POSTED IN:
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