Just this week I was working with some other PhD students and we were discussing ways we keep track of our research. Because there is a lot of research – books, journal articles, blog posts, web pages, and we want to have quick access with as little effort and duplication as possible.
First of all, I have a file naming convention (a throwback from my systems engineering days) that helps me quickly identify which articles I have already collected. I name my files with 3 pieces of information: last name of the first author, date of publication, and article title (or an abbreviated version). Here’s what it looks like –
APA citation of article: Gentikow, B. (2007). The role of media in developing literacies and cultural techniques. Digital Kompetanse, 2, 78–96.
My file name for the above article: Gentikow (2007) Role of media in developing literacies & cultural techniques.pdf
This makes it very easy for me to do a quick search of my saved articles to see if I already have a copy. I just type in the name of the author in my search box and I can tell at a glance if I have the article, even without seeing the full title. It is rather rare that an author will have 2 articles published in the same year with the same first few words of the title.
Unless the article is buried in many layers of folders, I can have a pretty long title but I try to make it as simple as possible. I usually leave out all the articles like ‘the’ and ‘a’, replace ‘and’ with ‘&’, and use dashes to connect title to sub-title (or leave one of them out entirely). Plus I have a lot of shorthand acronyms like OL=online, DE=distance education, and SM=social media. [Eventually, I think I may have to create a cheat sheet of all my abbreviations & shorthand so I know what they mean, but so far it’s been working fine.]
Secondly, I have multiple copies of my research collection scattered across several computers and platforms. At school, I use a PC and at home I have an iMac. I also have a PC laptop that travels back & forth plus I use my iPhone & iPad for research (mainly quick searches & reading). On all machines, I use Dropbox to synchronize my research. This way if I add & start reading an article while I’m studying in the Library, it will already be in my collection at home when I want to finish it later that night.
During our conversation, there was a corollary to the above statement: “What would you recommend for …?” and someone asked about citation management systems. I’ll save that answer for another post. ~swb
Living on the Steppes 