Keeping track of a research project in the 21st century

[Deliveroo]

(Apologies if I’m putting this in the wrong section)

It’s been a couple of decades since I last had to coordinate myself through a research paper and a lot has changed since then. For one thing, everything was so much slower - the time it took to track down papers, look up the citations indexes, get interlibrary loans, meant more time to think and process. Now I have 60 tabs open, and I’ve lost at least 4 of my 17 trains of thought.

I also used to handle actual paper, write notes with an actual pen (destroy swathes of rainforest in the process), and I had a sort of spatial and tactile memory organisation going on. Now if I have to plough back through so much bloody text to find anything, hoping I thought to note it at the time I read it (and often I don’t. I just see the links later, when I read something else, and remember that I read something like this before).

I have a pretty robust system for tracking my notes, citations and references. Although I’m sure there are better ways to do this now.

Where I’m struggling is capturing my thought flow - random ideas to chase later, or organising the open tabs into a navigable system.

I’d really appreciate it if any of you would be willing to share a bit about your process?

Zotero is a good reference manager - it will keep track of pdfs of papers and then you can annotate them etc. Make sure you get the browser extension so you can click a button in your browser and have it save the paper & all details etc.

if you prefer thinking on paper, I use Goodnotes on an ipad + apple pencil and then you can annotate the margins of a pdf in handwriting. I mostly use that to comment on drafts from students, but you can do more. the ipad + pencil combo is particularly nice for working on train / plane etc.

My only other tip is to have a double monitor setup on my proper work desk so that I can have the paper I'm reading on one side and the Word doc I'm writing notes in on the other side. I find it so much easier to take notes when I can see both things at once without having to flip between tabs.

That is so helpful. Thank you.

Scrivener is a brilliant app/ program. I think it was originally designed for novel and screenwriters and it was a novellist friend who recommended it to me. But it works just as well for reseach projects. It allows you to draft in a really organic way, and you can keep all your notes in the same project so that you can see stuff side-by-side. It really helps overcome the fear of the blinking cursor on a blank page too, as you kind of build up a project in sections, rather than starting from the top (although you can start from the top if you want to!). I also use Bookends as a bibliographic manager, but I still find I want to take new notes on sources for each separate project, so tend to keep the note-taking to Scrivener. It's not a free program, but if I recall you can get a very good educational discount. I've used it on everything now from planning my teaching/ organising my lecture notes to drafting journal articles, conference papers and keeping much bigger, multi-stakeholder research projects organised. It really is briliant, and I only scratch the surface of what you can do with it I think. (And no, I'm not being paid by them. I wish I was on a commission though as I recommend it all the time!).

I did my PhD 15 years ago, and for that I just had a separate Word file for notes on each source (!), organised in folders by chapter or topic, used Zotero for bib management and had a file of notes/ outline for each chapter/ section. So that can also work.

@FlappicusSmith thank you. I’ll check that out.

I use Trello for project management. I have a card for each stage of the project with deadlines aligned to the Gantt chart. I have another section that acts as an ongoing to do list with space to add detail on each ongoing task/card. Hard to describe but there are loads of online tutorials.