[OWW-Discuss] 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...

[John Cumbers]

HI all,
Sorry for the delay in sending this out, but thanks to all the tips for ways
to collect references and notes on-line, below are some recommendations from
people,
cheers,
John

*www.zotero.org
* >> From Ricardo:
John says: I'd looked at this Firefox plug-in before, but didn't think much
of it, but it has had significant updates recently, watch the intro screen
cast to see the features. Just like endnote for keeping ref's but also
allows you to easy grab any web page and store it locally, even annotate it
with stickies. This is the one that I've gone with. It almost has too many
features and is not that intuitive to use, but great support if you need
help. Evernote.com below looks awesome too and I may try it for a lab
notebook, particularly the search images function and the ability to scan in
hand written notes. Drawback; you have to pay to use it.


* http://www.evernote.com).
* >>Angela:
""I've just started to use a note-taking program called Evernote. You can
download a trial from this site (http://www.evernote.com). It's on special
offer until January 15, 2008 (€19.95). So far I'm really happy with it. You
can type notes directly into it. Drag and drop web clippings, excel and word
files, image files. You can also scan in images and docs - great for those
scrappy pieces of paper I write things down on! (I haven't tested this yet
though). It has a very good search facility - even finding text in images.
It can be installed on a home and work computer and you can synchronize
between computers using a usb thumb drive. It also has a portable version
which you can use on PCs that don't have the program installed. See the
links below for user stories from the user forum (
http://forum.evernote.com/phpbb/viewtopic.php?f=23&t=4990 ). There are a few
that might give you ideas for setting up a system that works for you.

*A few others:
* http://www.citavi.com/de/allgemeines/english.html
google notebook
TWiki ( personal wiki available for Mac and Win) and JabRef -


-- 
John Cumbers,  Graduate Student
Biology and Medicine
Brown University, Box G-W
Providence, Rhode Island, 02912, USA
Tel USA: +1 401 523 8190,  Fax: +1 401 863-2166
UK to USA: 0207 617 7824

On Jan 5, 2008 6:04 PM, John Cumbers <johncumbers at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hi all,
> 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...
>
> 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.
>
> *Here are a few strategies that have not worked that well in the past.
> *Find papers via pubmed/hubmed/scholar
> add papers to citeulike, many never end up getting read.
> print out a few key pdf's on paper
> go through these, make notes on the paper itself, make notes on scratch
> paper
> Write up key things on more scratch paper.
> File some of the PDF's via citeulike ID number in filing cabinet...  never
> to be looked at again..  get on with lab work
> or... create stack of unsortable papers, get on with lab work
> Lose papers in mass of other papers.  lose notes.
> repeat.
>
> 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.
>
> 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.
>
> Cheers,
> John
>
>
>
>
>
>
> --
> John Cumbers,  Graduate Student
> Biology and Medicine
> Brown University, Box G-W
> Providence, Rhode Island, 02912, USA
> Tel USA: +1 401 523 8190,  Fax: +1 401 863-2166
> UK to USA: 0207 617 7824




-- 
John Cumbers,  Graduate Student
Molecular Biology, Cell Biology, and Biochemistry
Biology and Medicine
Brown University, Box G-W
Providence, Rhode Island, 02912, USA
Tel USA: +1 401 523 8190,  Fax: +1 401 863-2166
UK to USA: 0207 617 7824
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://mailman.mit.edu/pipermail/oww-discuss/attachments/20080208/0a9e32a4/attachment.htm