Comments on: Managing all those Articles

By: kristarella

kristarella — Thu, 10 Apr 2008 04:05:39 +0000

I would use Papers if it had an internal reader/note maker/highlighter type thing, but it doesn’t seem to. I used BibDesk + Skim for managing, finding, reading and highlighting for my last paper. Worked well!

By: Alexandra

Alexandra — Wed, 30 Jan 2008 03:25:55 +0000

Thanks Dave! That makes a lot of sense… I think my dissertation folder has way too many subfolders within subfolders… old habits die hard I suppose…

By: Tim

Tim — Fri, 25 Jan 2008 04:34:59 +0000

You can use both Papers and DevonThink, without duplication.
Because Papers saves everything in a folder (with sub-folders), and DevonThink allows you to synchronise a folder, you can import all your academic articles into Papers then synchronise that folder within DevonThink. All the articles are then accessible, and searchable, within DT exactly as if they had been imported. If you have a highly structured DT database, you can still replicate each article into the relevant DT group(s).
Note: I think moving them works too, but I haven’t tried. I like to have a copy within the Papers “group” in DT so I know it’s there. I’ve excluded the Papers group from classification so articles aren’t classified as “Papers” (this will make sense to regular DT users, apologies to other readers)

The whole process takes literally only a couple of minutes to set-up, although if you have a well-established DT database it can take a while to remove the original copies. This has been my workflow for some months now and has worked brilliantly. I only wish I had known to synchronise from the start - it took me a while to come up with the synchronisation method.

By: dave

dave — Wed, 23 Jan 2008 21:28:24 +0000

Regarding PC Users:

The only option I know of that my PC friends use is OneNote (made my Microsoft).

Regarding Devon:

My database is 300mb. Which is not very large at all, and I throw quite a bit into it. I usually take rich text notes from web pages rather than the whole web archive to avoid all the extra images etc. which usually are on a page.

My structure is fairly simple I have one folder called inbox which is where all imports go. Then I have about 12 folders which are rough categories, “Wikipeida” (for my project on Wikipedia) “Dissertation” (all research for the Dissertation was put—this is the only one with subcatagories for each chapter) “Twitter” (articles I am collecting on Twitter) “code” (place all the xhtml, css, etc which I might need to locate) “teaching” (notes and syllabi) etc. Mainly I rely on the search function to show me what I want and show me related articles.

By: Todd

Todd — Wed, 23 Jan 2008 21:11:29 +0000

What about for windows users? I’ve tried del.icio.us, and google notebook. Are there better options for PC users?

By: Alexandra

Alexandra — Sat, 19 Jan 2008 02:14:53 +0000

Hi Dave,

I’ve started recently using Devon to organize my research notes and some of my material. I noticed that the database file is getting quite big though… Right now it sits at 118 MB… I was just wondering how big are your DT databases?

Overall, I’m enjoying making my notes in it. I was wondering how you organized your files within it… Would you be willing to share a picture of your basic structure?

Thanks!

By: Trevor

Trevor — Thu, 03 Jan 2008 07:34:20 +0000

BibDesk offers many of the same features as Papers, and it’s free.

By: islamoyankee

islamoyankee — Thu, 03 Jan 2008 03:21:07 +0000

I use and abuse Bookends (http://www.sonnysoftware.com/) which now includes direct searching of JSTOR and has included direct searching of MUSE for some time. Of course, it also includes direct search and downloading from PubMed.