Since my first supervisory meeting I’ve been cracking on with the literature review, and it feels like I’m making a bit of progress. All the reading has led me to think about how I’m processing the literature though. Technology comes to the rescue again!
Processing Research Papers Digitally: Look Maw, No Paper!
the Ipad: A bit pricey, but pretty good for literature reviewing
Initially I had been learning how to use Zotero for keeping track of my research. The choice was mainly dictated by the fact that my supervisors both use it, and it was felt that it would be useful to be able to share papers through the system.
On the plus side, it seems good for quickly logging papers that I intend to read. It’s really easy to import a PDF, either from my hard drive or from the web. On the other hand, I don’t think it’s adequate for logging notes and reflections on those papers. The note taking tool is seperate from the papers themselves, making it a but cumbersome to use.
Ideally, I would like to read papers on my iPad, associating notes and highlights with the PDF somehow. With that aim in mind, I’ve spent some time this week researching how others do this. On various researcher’s blogs I came across a number of tools, but one that kept coming up was Goodreader. This is a very full-featured PDF reader which allows annotations in a number of different formats. Importantly, it makes the notes internal to the PDF, so they can be read anywhere. It also works with Dropbox, so it’s likely that I can sync it with Zotero. Ideally I’d like a system that allows me to search the notes I make on papers, but I haven’t found one like this yet.
I think finding a good system for consuming and processing research is really important. I know that I don’t work well on paper – I have bad handwriting, write slowly and I’m not great at organising hardcopies and notes. I’d much prefer to be paperless, and there are a huge amount of advantages to having my entire bibliography and associated notes with me at all times, backed up automatically and fully searchable.
2 Weeks Later – The Ideal Research System
I’ve now used Goodreader for a couple of weeks, and I can say I think I’ve found a system as close to perfect as I can make it. I’ve moved over to Mendelay now, away from Zotero, primarily because Mendelay has a free iPad app. It also seems to have better networking tools though, and the web interface is much nicer and easy to use.
My process now is that I have Goodreader synced with a folder in my dropbox. In there are all of my papers. Mendelay is also synced to this folder, so that’s where it draws it’s papers from. So, when I read something, I open it in Goodreader and make my notes directly into the PDF. I then save it and sync the folder, thus updating my global version of the PDF in Dropbox. So, next time I open up Mendelay on the Desktop, it syncs with Dropbox and replaces the current PDFs with the new ones containing the notes. Perfect!
Even better, Goodreader can email a copy of all notes within a PDF, so you can get a summary of everything you wrote about a certain paper at any time.
So, I’ll see how that process suits me long term, and will report back if I improve it.
How do you manage your digital papers? Do you have a better system? I’d love to know – drop me a comment below. Look forward to hearing from you!
colinmcgray
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Hi Colin,
Your site is great and very helpful for me who hasn’t started looking for any of that stuff yet. I have heard about zotero but not seen it working. The point you make about integrating comments and highlighted areas in the document is an important one. So far, I have always printed papers and read them and made notes on them… no idea how I will manage if I go paperless and I don’t have an ipad yet… was thinking about a mini ipad.
All the best with your project and I will follow it with great interest.
Chrissi
Glad you found it helpful Chrissi! I really struggle with doing things on paper, because I feel like it’s just a waste as I’ll never look back. Having them within the PDF, though, means that I can search all my notes, and my comments, and hopefully be a bit more efficient in future. I’ve found actually that it’s better just to use Goodreader the whole time, and just use Mendelay or Zotero to collect your references, as it’s tricky syncing editing PDFs with either. Still learning!
Colin