Organising research literature can be a tedious task, especially when one also wants to keep track of helpful insights found in literature or to lookup certain citations and link related articles. Of course: as digital as possible. Having multiple devices (desktop, laptop, iPad, and phone) which I’d like to pick up depending on my circumstances; my research toolbox must be cross-platform and cloud-based. And did I say I am very lazy? I desire as much automation as possible, freeing me to do the research itself, instead of keeping track of all bibliographical metadata.

First I started with a spreadsheet that contained some macros to tie all bibliographic information together to a proper reference style.   But, over the last years, I discovered some tools, which helped me out in my research activities and which fitted my specifications. Let me introduce you to them:

Zotero

Fundamental to my setup is Zotero (www.zotero.org), advertised as “your personal research assistant”. Zotero, being a reference manager, stands in line with Mendely, Refworks and Endnote. It is a free cross-platform tool (provided for Linux, Mac and Windows) and makes my life very easy.

• File repository with metadata management and indexing features: it stores the metadata of your literature in a database and is able to produce bibliographical data in hundreds of academic citation styles. As it also integrates with some Internet-browsers, you can add references right from the internet to Zotero. But it also can do a metadata search for added PDFs, can add items based on provided identifiers such as ISBN, DOI or PMID; or add bibliographical information from amazon.com for instance. When all these smart options don’t work out for you, there always is the option to add items by hand.
• Integrate your references with one click in the word processor of choice: when installing Zotero, plugins for your word processor (Microsoft Word, LibreOffice, or OpenOffice) can be added, adding functionality to insert citations and references in your articles by selecting them from Zotero. Another great feature is, that the plugin can automatically build a list of references from the works you’ve cited in your articles and add this as a reference list that is being synchronized with your edits. When you cite another resource or remove a citation, your list is being updated. It also updates your reference list when you add missing bibliographical information, i.e. an omitted author name.

When you have collected a lot of references within Zotero, you probably will be looking for a way to read them and store your notes and annotations. I use several applications for this, depending on the device I use. My preference is to store everything digitally. Therefore I use the following applications on a regular basis.

PDF X-change viewer (Windows)

A great way to read PDF documents, to mark and annotate specific passages, but also to OCR text from scanned or photographed pages.

This last option has proven itself to be, though not perfect, very usefull for those pages which only exists as images. By applying OCR (optical character recognition) to your texts you can make them searchable.

Microsoft Onenote (cross-platform)

Goodnotes (iOS)

Papership (iOS)

September 11, 2017 5:03 pm