Comments on: How to organize your papers

By: File Cabinets

File Cabinets — Wed, 30 Dec 2009 17:57:28 +0000

10,000 papers? I am impressed! I definitely feel inspired to organize my 100+ papers. Thanks for the tips!

By: sciencegirl

sciencegirl — Wed, 02 Jan 2008 11:13:56 +0000

"Start now. Get a good system and use it early in your career or you will be swimming in chaos later."I did - and chose to go all digital. Here's my little system.

By: pelf

pelf — Wed, 02 Jan 2008 05:15:51 +0000

To echo Anu’s words, thanks for the inspiration, Greg. I was just informed that I had to move out of my Graduate Lounge because more students are enrolled this semester (and I’ve completed my thesis-writing). Which means that I will be bringing home a box of papers (to add to those that have already been brought home earlier). So I definitely must file some 10 to 20 papers in Zotero before I leave to do my Ph.D. this year 😀

By: greg laden

greg laden — Tue, 01 Jan 2008 10:32:22 +0000

Johnny: My friend said that in the 80s, so he was going back less than ten years. By those standards, a 1985 paper should be in the rare book room!Morgan, I have very mixed feelings about keeping the PDF’s. I find it very handy to have the PDF’s I’m working with at hand (thus, it’s handy, I suppose) but then why store them?I recently sent a student off to the field with a CD of PDF’s that she and I were using for a collaborative project. Sometimes the networks are down, and the means of getting to the PDF’s vis many different sources is annoying, not always reliable, sometimes changes interfaces (more annoyance) etc., so having them on my hard drive is nice.

By: Anu

Anu — Tue, 01 Jan 2008 07:54:36 +0000

Thanks Greg, I feel inspired to add “organize papers” onto my list of resolutions for a year. I finally invested in some filing folders and endnote in recent weeks, but the program hasn’t been touched yet and the papers are in disarray after several attempts at filing by subject (as it turns out, the worst idea ever).

By: Morgan Price

Morgan Price — Tue, 01 Jan 2008 01:34:47 +0000

For most scientists, only papers from the last 10 years or so are usually cited. The recent ones are usually available online, and many of the older journal issues have been scanned as well (at least in molecular biology & bacteriology). So it is possible to rely on the web to “get back” to papers, and to “print and recycle” as Johnny puts it.Of course, there are some fields in which older work is often cited (e.g., archeology, taxonomy, mathematics), and then keeping a collection of physical papers is more important. I’m not sure I see the advantage of keeping a PDF collection, though.Even though almost everything I need is online, I do maintain a citation database. It’s an important fall-back to have, even though Pubmed and Google Scholar are usually more convenient unless I’m actually adding a citation to a paper. My “database” is just a bibtex file — categorizing papers by topic and such seems like too much effort unless I’m writing a review (in which case I recommend organizing papers by the paper outline) or learning a new field (in which case I recommend writing a review!).

By: Johnny Chimpo

Johnny Chimpo — Mon, 31 Dec 2007 21:24:35 +0000

“You remind me of my friend Tom who, back in graduate school days, said “if it was published before 1978, it is not important”Well, there’s probably a lot of truth to that, if I’m being honest (although, of course now the cutoff would probably be, say, 1997 ?).OK, I just looked at the paper I published last month, and the earliest cite was 1985, but that was for a side point in the discussion. All the rest are from 2000 on.But I suspect you’re right, it’s the collection aspect that is most important for a lot of people.

By: mark

mark — Mon, 31 Dec 2007 11:52:35 +0000

I wish I had that stuff when I was a pup–I started by using index cards, and quickly learned that cross-indexing, while very useful, was very tedious. I finally bought Papyrus, which was way cheaper than the rest (and they made of point of stating that their license did not prohibit loading the software on as many computers as you wish). My current problem is paper storage. I employ the one-pile-on-the-floor-here, -another pile-on-the-floor-there,-etc. method, as all cabinets are crammed full.

By: greg laden

greg laden — Mon, 31 Dec 2007 11:14:54 +0000

Johnny: You remind me of my friend Tom who, back in graduate school days, said “if it was published before 1978, it is not important).Of the 10K papers I’ve got in my file cabinets, maybe 25 percent could ever be accessed on line.Also, the database allows me to keep track, compile, think, organize thoughts and not just objects, in a way that recycling would interfere with.Finally, it is a bit of an avocational thing with some of us. I also have a substantial library of books even though there are libraries that I could use instead. Its instead of collecting stamps, maybe.

By: Johnny Chimpo

Johnny Chimpo — Mon, 31 Dec 2007 10:45:14 +0000

OK, seriously, am I the only one that doesn’t keep a library? I have maybe a dozen or so papers that I’m actively reading/referencing at any given time. Any thing else I print off, read, then recycle. My “library” is pubmed, and web of science. If I say to myself, “that paper, by so-and-so, looked at X”, it’s a hell of a lot easier and far less space consuming to just look it up and print off another copy than to keep hardcopies lying around indefinitely.OF course, it helps that anything I’m likely to be interested in is online in pdf.