Hi everyone,
I’m pretty new to doing research and I’ve run into a bit of a problem. I often get research ideas popping up, and when I sit down to read papers, I find myself struggling to organize everything.
For example:
Sometimes when I read a paper, a certain section feels really important, but later I forget exactly which part it was or why it felt important.
I want to highlight parts or leave little notes while reading, but I’m not sure what’s the best way to do it.
While searching for papers, I also stumble upon interesting ones that aren’t relevant to my current project but could be useful for future topics. I want a way to save and track those too.
Sometimes I don’t like the overall paper but find the method/algorithm very useful, and I want to somehow mark that as well.
I guess what I’m asking is:
How do you all manage all this information overload?
What kind of tools, apps, workflows, or methods do you use?
Would really appreciate any advice, even if it’s just simple habits or routines you follow!
Thanks!
Comments
I have a notebook to write down whatever comes to my mind; and I also use google spreadsheet to organise everything work related
You sound like you need to join r/Zettelkasten which was purpose-built for solving this exact problem
See this thread for a number of tips on Zotero, which a lot of people like to use for just this purpose—organizing notes and citations in one place.
Another route you could pursue is building procedures for yourself. You can construct a system of folders and text files, annotated PDFs, spreadsheets etc., that suits your style of work, if you have the patience for it. That’s what I do personally. The start-up costs a little bit greater than learning a new program, but not prohibitively so, and you gain flexibility. But a lot of people will swear by a particular tool, such as Zotero, Scrivener, etc. It’s worth trying them out to see what you think.
I build annotated bibliographies by topic. I also highlight a few key points in the PDF of the study for ease of reference later. It takes a little bit of effort in the short-term but has saved me hours in the long-term.
If I come across something and don’t have time to highlight and write the summary right then, I save it into a “For Review” folder that I come back to when I have more time.
Just wanted to jump in and say: man I respect you all endlessly for being so organised!
Me I just download papers (that I know I probably won’t look at again), skim some of them and just remember names and years of articles for future reference, and have zero master lists. I even forget where I’ve cited papers before, so I redo most of my bibtex files each time I write something 😅