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How to read long, dense articles?

How do PhD students keep track of all articles they have read?

  • A week from now, I will start my PhD in computer science. While writing my master's thesis over a period of six months, it sometimes happened that I knew I had read a certain piece of information somewhere, but simply could not remember where. Although I stored all the literature on my disk, these situations required tedious efforts to recover the article I was looking for. As a PhD takes much longer than a master's thesis and will contain many more academic articles, I fear that such cases will arise more and more if I do not make an effort to counter this from the start. What kind of strategies or applications do you guys recommend in order to make sure that you are able to recover information from articles you have previously read?

  • Answer:

    Absolutely use a software to help you keep track. The most famous one is Endnote, but alternatives (some arguably superior) include Mendeley, Zotero, and Papers. I use Endnote (for now). Whenever I have a new source, I enter its information into Endnote (which formats citations automatically, which is nice), and, if possible, copy the abstract into the citation. As I read the article, I type any notes I have into the Endnote entry in the abstract. That way my notes and the citation are right next to each other. I also keep the pdf file of the article sorted in my computer according to topic. Since my notes are detailed, I can use Endnote's search function to find the article where I types something. For example, I can search for "calcium" and find any article that had the word calcium in the title, abstract, or in my notes, and then I can search for the pdf using the title. Other software can do more, like Papers, which apparently also sorts your files automatically and lets you highlight and take notes on the pdf itself or something. I plan to give it a shot, but I'm 4/5 years into my PhD so I won't be changing software just yet. These softwares will save you hours or days of time, you must use at least one!

Matan Shelomi at Quora Visit the source

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I use the excellent JabRef for keeping track of all my articles, i.e. managing a bibtex database. It is a bit "manual" compared to other programs but the benefit is that you download citation data directly from the publisher so it's almost guaranteed to be correct (other programs sometimes get confused when trying to guess title and authors from the pdf). Having all the data in bibtex format also means that when writing papers you can add citations very easily.

Michal Romaniuk

I use zotero and bibtex.

Joseph Wang

I'm working on a tool right now that should help with this.  http://www.roottracker.com/.  As you read, you'll be able to track articles with a click of a button.  Root will record the article and categorize it by topic.  Is this what you're thinking?

Matt Bodien

Try Citavi. It is more than just a reference management program, it contains a knowledge organizer and a task planner, too. The reference management part is quite similar to other applications: you import articles and books that you have already, and you search for new texts and import the bibliographic meta data. You can also add tasks to references and schedule them. The reading and analyzing part is different: you can annotate PDF documents directly in Citavi. You can add red and yellow highlights, but also direct quotations, indirect quotations, summaries, and comments, apart from you own ideas that you get while you are reading. All those "knowledge items" can then be organized in the "Knowledge" section of Citavi, where you can create the outline of your thesis, and assign comments, ideas, etc. to specific chapters (in Citavi, they are called categories). Knowledge items in a chapter can be reordered to develop your argument - long before you actually start writing. When you are ready, you can export everything to Word where you will find yourself with a draft version of your thesis, with the categories exported as chapters, and with the bibliography at the end, created automatically from the references the quotations where taken from. Have a look at the video "Citavi 5 in a Nutshell" to understand how smoothly it all fits together. Citavi is free for up to 100 references, but you will not regret it if you buy a license, because you will get full (and very fast) support if ever you need an answer to a question.

Patrick Hilt

I use Docear and Zotero. Docear for annotation and tree view, Zotero for meta reference download http://www.docear.org/

Renan Prasta Jenie

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