This link has been bookmarked by 28 people . It was first bookmarked on 17 Dec 2008, by Sean Devine.
-
teramartinprograms to organize downloaded journal articles!
-
paulcalzMentions useful organizing software - Papers & Zotero
-
-
Several pieces of software are now being developed to address this problem. I
want to look at two of them here. The first is called Zotero; the second,
Papers. Both are in version 1 and are still a bit buggy; but each has the
potential, I think, to become a valuable tool for research.Zotero aims to let you build
a library of useful books and articles that you encounter while surfing online.
It’s an extension of the Web browser Firefox, and as you’d expect, it’s free to
download and easy to install.Once you’ve installed it, each time you visit a Web page that contains items
— books, newspaper articles, soundtracks, films, etc. — with bibliographic
information, it extracts that information and allows you to save it to your
Zotero library if you want to.So, suppose you’re interested in books about the psychology of war, and you
go to Amazon and type “On Killing” into the search box. A list of books appears;
Zotero collects the information for all of them and allows you to select the
ones you want to keep. These are then put into your Zotero library. Once they’re
there, you can make notes on them, put them into folders with other items that
are related, and so on. If you ask it to, Zotero will see if it can find a given
book in a local lending library. And, supposedly, you can also pull
bibliographic information from Zotero into documents you’re writing, but I
haven’t tried that part yet.It’s a powerful piece of software with a lot of capabilities, though not all
of them work as well as they could. For instance, it’s hit-or-miss with
newspaper articles — sometimes it recognizes them, sometimes it doesn’t — and it
can’t interpret information from, alas, my local lending library. It does,
however, allow you to screen grab, so you can still collect such information if
you want it. The screen grab also allows you to add interesting Web pages to
your Zotero library. (This is different from storing the link to a Web site. The
screen grab gives you the page as it was when you looked at it; clicking a link
gives you a site as it is today.)A minor quibble: if you use a small laptop, as I do, you may find the Zotero
window occupies too much of the screen. But I shall certainly keep using it,
though not, perhaps as its conceivers intended. For me, it’ll be a scrapbook of
interesting stuff — books to buy later, press releases on subjects I think I
might write about one day, magazine pieces about cities I’m thinking of
visiting.For the bulk of my researches, however, I shall use Papers. This software has
been designed for the Macintosh by two avid fans who call themselves Mekentosj;
it only works on the Macintosh platform. It’s not free, but it is quite cheap
(20 pounds sterling; 40 U.S. dollars) and, for me, it’s been worth the money.
For it solves the problem I started out describing — how to keep on top of
scientific articles. How to know which ones you have, where they are, and what
else you’ve got on the same subject.The makers describe it as iTunes for .pdf files, and that’s broadly right.
(For anyone who’s never encountered these things, a .pdf file is a type of
document file that any computer can open using a free downloadable piece of
software. This is the form electronic journal articles come in, and it means
they look just as they would have done if you were reading the journal the old
fashioned way. iTunes is a piece of music management software.) The idea is
that, when you download an article, it goes into your Papers library. The
bibliographic information immediately appears; so does, if you’re lucky, the
“metadata” — like the abstract and the list of subjects that the authors thought
their article touches on. (I say “if you’re lucky” because this doesn’t always
happen automatically.) The document itself gets neatly filed in a folder on your
hard drive, and renamed by authors and year. Gone are the days of 456330a.pdf
and sd-article121.pdf. Hallelujah.And that’s just the beginning. Not only can you read the papers, annotate
them, find them and create folders of papers on related subjects, you can also
use the software to search the big scientific databases like PubMed and the Web
of Science. (Such databases are where you go to find out what’s already been
published on the subject you’re interested in; it’s where most scientists find
out about the papers they want to collect.) It doesn’t (yet) replace
bibliographic software such as Endnote -
Papers does have some teething problems. As I said, it’s still buggy, so not
everything functions as it should. Moreover, the way it works is not always
intuitive, and there’s no formal “help.” Instead, if you have a question, you
have to wade through user forums to try to see if anyone else has had the same
question before — and, more to the point, whether anyone has answered it. But
after a couple of days of experimenting, I got it doing exactly what I need.Organizing materials is always idiosyncratic. I have one friend who organizes
the novels he owns by the year in which the books were published; another goes
by the color of the spine. (The first accused the second of having the soul of
an interior decorator.) But the important thing is not how you do it, but
whether it works — whether you can find what you’re looking for. These bits of
software open up possibilities; for some people they will be useful, for others
they won’t. Some will use both, others neither. For me, well, a few days after
discovering Papers, I put 20 sacks of real paper into the recycling bin. At
last, I’m back to knowing what I have and where it is.Bedlam has been defeated.
-
-
-
Here’s what I used to do, way back, oh, seven years ago when I was writing a book about the sex lives of animals. When I wanted to do research on a topic, I would go to the university library — how quaint! — and photocopy the scientific papers I wanted to read. Papers such as “Homosexual rape and sexual selection in Acanthocephalan worms” from the journal Science. Or “Deformed sperm are probably not adaptive” from Animal Behaviour. If I was looking for something more obscure — say, “A review of tool use in insects” from Florida Entomologist — I sometimes had to go to a specialist library, like the one in London’s Natural History Museum.
-
-
-
Isk AldurHow to organize papers, books, etc. Mentions "Zotero" and "Papers"
-
Pat Sinethe problem of how to organize the information you have so that you know what you’ve got.
-
-
Several pieces of software are now being developed to address this problem. I want to look at two of them here. The first is called Zotero; the second, Papers. Both are in version 1 and are still a bit buggy; but each has the potential, I think, to become a valuable tool for research.
-
-
recriweb prinkipo[Olivia Judson Blog - NYTimes.com] "This week, I want to look at one of the unglamorous, but essential, parts of science: the problem of how to organize the information you have so that you know what you’ve got. For, like everything else in the digital age, the process of collecting and managing scientific information has been evolving. Fast".
-
Fernando GonzalezUn artículo en nyt sobre Zotero
Would you like to comment?
Join Diigo for a free account, or sign in if you are already a member.