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Organizing Research Resources
Episode 73: March 10, 2009

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Stever Robbins here. Welcome to The Get-It-Done Guy’s Quick and Dirty Tips to Work Less and Do More.

Jane writes in:

I'm a grad student. I do a lot of online research. How do I keep track of all the links and material I find when researching? Pasting it into one massive word processing document doesn't seem like the best idea, and my Internet bookmarks are out of control.

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The information revolution is wonderful, isn’t it? Madge, what am I going to do? I have so much information, I’m soaking in it. We need a tool. A tool to collect facts and links and notes. One tool. Yes, one tool to rule them all, one tool to find them, one tool to bring them all, organize, and bind them. -evil laugh- First we’ll identify our needs, then, specific tools.

You Need a Free-Form Bucket

You’ll need to put the info you collect into a general purpose information-holding tool, something where you can have notes, pictures, Web links, bookmarks, fine art, incriminating information about your political opponents, etcetera.

A database won’t do, because databases only store stuff where you know the kind of stuff and what it’s like in advance. It’s also a pain to set up and use a database.

But what will work is a tool that lets you put everything into one document. That way, as you find relevant stuff, you can just toss it into the document for future reference. The same goes for bookmarks: you want to toss the bookmarks, and maybe even a snapshot of the webpage itself, into one big bucket. Kind of like the “mystery stew” that your local diner serves when it’s been a long time since the last food delivery.

You Need Free-Form Retrieval

Pulling things out of a bucket can be harder than putting them in. Anyone who’s accidentally dropped a wedding ring into a bucket of raw chicken parts knows this. Tags are the answer. A tag is a word you associate with an item. When you put an item in your bucket, give it a tag for every way you can conceive of wanting to find it later. For example, if you are researching original American cuisine, you might find a recipe for Beefy Salsa Macaroni and Velveeta Cheese. You could give it the tags “main-course,” “beef,” “macaroni”, “cheese-food-by-product,” “bingo” (it’s good bingo food), “bridge,” “mahjongg”, “Midwest,” “comfort-food”, “long-shelf-life,” “Kraft,” and “superbowl-appropriate.”

Later, you may be investigating the relationship between North American sports behavior and Kraft Corporation’s quest for world dominance. You search your database for tags “superbowl” and “Kraft” and voila (that’s French), up pops your amazing recipe.

Lastly, You Need Organization

Once you have all the information, you need to be able to group it in multiple ways to find patterns, themes, and different ways of organizing it. You’d like to be able to copy items easily so you can try putting them in different places in your developing understanding of your subject.

You Can Find All the Tools on The Internet

Sadly, there is no one tool that stores, tags, and organizes. But some come close. Closest is Evernote. It lets you capture notes, images, links, and webpages in a completely freeform database. You can tag each entry, organize items into notebooks, and search for tags or text. You can even search for text that appears in images. I don’t know how they do it; it’s magic. Evernote is free and has a version for the Mac, PC, Windows Mobile, and the iPhone. It also has a Firefox plug-in to snapshot web pages.

Mind mapping software like Mind Manager lets you enter freeform ideas, save and follow bookmarks, and annotate your ideas. It doesn’t support tags directly, but you can enter tags as part of the text on a branch and then filter out branches containing that tagword.

If you’re collecting just bookmarks, Delicious.com gives you a place to store them, tag them, search for them, and share them with friends. Or, the world. It also has a Firefox plug-in for quick bookmarking. Just be careful, since your bookmarks are public by default. You don’t want your kids seeing your link to George Carlin’s “Seven Words You Can’t Say on TV” skit.

Firefox Help Store Research Data On Your Machine

If you like keeping your info on your own machine, Firefox has plug-ins called Scrapbook and TagSifter. Scrapbook snapshots webpages you like and stores them on your hard drive. It’s great for storage, but only provides retrieval by title. TagSifter lets you bookmark webpages and tag the bookmarks, so you can find web pages by clicking through a tag cloud. Of course, your bookmarks stay on your computer, so you can’t access them when traveling.

Lord of the Databases

Armed with this suite of tools, you can’t go wrong. One tool to store them all—Evernote online or Scrapbook offline. One tool to find them—tags, in Evernote, Delicious, and TagSifter. And one tool to bring them all, organize, and bind them—that’s mind mapping software, which I talked about in episode 56.

Remember to try GotoAssist Express free for 30 days! For this special offer, visit GotoAssist.com/techpodcast.

Visit this episode’s transcript at http://getitdone.quickanddirtytips.com for links to all the software I’ve discussed in this episode. Thank you to J.R.R. Tolkien and George Carlin.

This is Stever Robbins. Follow me on Twitter by doing Follow GetitDoneGuy. Email questions to getitdone@quickanddirtytips.com. Get me and other great Quick and Dirty Tips shows streamed to your iPhone with Stitcher, download it free from Stitcher.com.

Work Less, Do More, and have a Great Life!

RESOURCES:

http://www.mindjet.com - Mind mapping software

http://www.evernote.com - Evernote freeform database

http://www.delicious.com - Delicious bookmarketing

http://www.recipezaar.com/Beefy-Salsa-Macaroni-and-Velveeta-Cheese-126236 - Beefy Salsa Macaroni and Velveeta Cheese recipe

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/998 - Firefox Tagsifter add-on

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/427 - Firefox Scrapbook add-on

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3_Nrp7cj_tM - The Seven Words you Can’t Say on TV, by George Carlin (WARNING! Bad language!)

Comments (11) for Organizing Research Resources | Subscribe to Comment

rbtlowe Says:
4/2/2009 1:50:13 PM

I agree with Stever about Evernote as the choice on the Mac. It is FREE (hard to believe) and syncs to any computer you want it to AND to the iPhone! It also has character recognition of text in images that are in your collection, so they come up as results in searches. I've never seen anything quite so robust, and it has always performed well.

DDog Says:
3/31/2009 7:38:56 PM

For Mac users, I recommend Scrivener: http://literatureandlatte.com/ It keeps all the research components and the original writing components in the same application. You can store nearly any kind of file in the research section—PDFs, movies, pictures, webpages... It also features a digital corkboard which allows you to view each discrete file as an index card, which you can write summary notes and tags on, and drag and drop where you need them. Folders nest as deep or as shallow as you need them to, and the split-screen function allows you to view your research items and your draft items at the same time really easily. The program auto-saves frequently and you can also take snapshots of the entire state of the project at any point in time. It's designed for novel-writing but I've used it to great effect for research papers and even keeping track of daily notes and readings for my classes. There are a lot more features than what I've listed, and I love it. I highly recommend it to Mac users. The license is $39.95 but you can try it free for 30 days (of actual use, not continuous calendar time) to see whether it works for you.

Michael Deutch Says:
3/26/2009 2:58:15 PM

Zork, that's great! I suppose if I'm successful evangelizing MindManager in America, our economy will recover! No pressure.

Samir Says:
3/12/2009 7:33:04 AM

Jane - when I was a PhD graduate student, I face this very dilemna. I solved it and created a presentation on it called "Optimal Strategies for Searching, Citing, and Organizing Electronic Research Literature" that I presented at a librarian conference, even though I was a biomedical engineer. I use software called Reference Manager. It can download references from PubMed, Ebsco, and other sources. You can include a link and the PDF file. You can also put in websites. For each reference, it creates a number. OK, so now he's the hard part. I created an Access "index card". So whatever I highlighted in a paper, I'd copy it into my index card database. I had a search ability, as well as to list all cards by topic. It made it SO MUCH EASIER to write the introduction to my dissertation. Reference Manager also takes care of doing the bibliography. If you would like more info, search for my presentation so you can find my school and full name, and then find me on Linked In and I can send it to you.

Juliette Says:
3/11/2009 9:11:06 AM

Another vote for Zotero!

Sue Says:
3/10/2009 9:57:00 PM

As SD says, you missed Zotero. Completely free, works with Firefox, is a reference manager, does bibliographies, keeps pdfs or archives web pages for you, you can put things in multiple folders or tags for cross reference, and you can add your own notes and comments to each reference.

Michael Deutch Says:
3/10/2009 5:50:44 PM

Stever, Another great episode! Just wanted to let you know that Mindjet's text markers allow you to 'tag' topics. Not sure if that's what you meant when you said "It doesn’t support tags directly, but you can enter tags as part of the text on a branch...". I'd be happy to show you if you aren't aware of this feature. Cheers, Michael

Zork Says:
3/10/2009 1:12:33 PM

mindmanager is the best ~ that's why europeans are better, we use it ... americans don't.

SD Says:
3/10/2009 12:25:33 PM

Zotero (zotero.org) is a plug in that will organize and capture references from the web, or any other source. RefWorks is another helpful one.

Lee Seitz Says:
3/10/2009 9:57:48 AM

You mentioned that bookmarks can't be access when traveling. If you want to keep your bookmarks synched across multiple machines, I recommend Foxmarks (www.foxmarks.com). I've just started using it, but it seems to work great and supports multiple browsers.

rc Says:
3/10/2009 7:42:11 AM

Check out http://www.tiddlywiki.org, this will do everything this week's cast is talking about and will run off of a usb drive.