Hi all, <br>So I'm halfway through my PhD and I'm just launching into some updated reading for an old project and I'm looking at a better way to collect my notes together. I'm hoping that there is a great new tool available that someone can tell me about to make my life easier... or at least a better strategy that someone has found to do this sort of research by...
<br><br>I want something to collect notes from meetings with my supervisor, experiments I plan to do, notes from reading, diagrams, references. Ideally something that would show me a list of notes I've taken, in chronological order and also searchable via tags.
<br><br><i>Here are a few strategies that have <b>not </b>worked that well in the past.<br></i>Find papers via pubmed/hubmed/scholar<br>add papers to citeulike, many never end up getting read.<br>print out a few key pdf's on paper
<br>go through these, make notes on the paper itself, make notes on scratch paper<br>Write up key things on more scratch paper. <br>File some of the PDF's via citeulike ID number in filing cabinet... never to be looked at again.. get on with lab work
<br>or... create stack of unsortable papers, get on with lab work<br>Lose papers in mass of other papers. lose notes.<br>repeat.<br>
<br>Next best thing might be a paper notebook like a lab book. But this gets equally as messy, although I could repeat this with an index to be move successful. But a paper book is not easily searchable. What about a word doc... argh... can you imagine... maybe there are better tools for Mac or Unix, but I'm currently mostly on a PC.
<br><br>Can you help? Do you have a better strategy, or tool to recommend? I've googled a few times for things like this but never found anything satisfactory.<br><br>Cheers, <br>John<br><br><br><br><br><br clear="all">
<br>-- <br> John Cumbers, Graduate Student<br>Biology and Medicine <br>Brown University, Box G-W<br>Providence, Rhode Island, 02912, USA<br>Tel USA: +1 401 523 8190, Fax: +1 401 863-2166 <br>UK to USA: 0207 617 7824