[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,
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
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