Digital Research Tools & Workflows

[_intrigue_]

Hi all. To set myself up for success in grad school, I've been doing a lot of exploration of digital research tools. Specifically, I'm trying to hone in on an ideal research workflow, involving: 

• gathering articles/other relevant materials
• organizing the files (including renaming PDFs)
• annotating materials
• writing manuscripts

If anyone else is interested in this topic, I'd love to share experiences!

 

Currently, I'm teaching myself how to use two programs, Devonthink Pro Office, and Sente. In addition to Scrivener, which I already use, this seems like it might make up a good workflow, based on my needs. I am still in the process of figuring out how these 3 programs work best together.

 

For anyone interested, these are some of my perceived needs, and why I chose the three programs above:

 

• I need all my materials to be fully searchable. Devonthink Pro Office includes an OCR tool.
• I need my annotations (notes) to be easily exportable (and searchable), and include the original quote and citation. Sente's annotations are unique in that they include a title, your note, the original quote, and the citation. When put into Devonthink, the notes are easily searchable
• When writing, I need lots of organizational flexibility (I think of things in lots of different ways, and tend to write short snippets that aren't directly related to each other). Scrivener has lots of different prewriting options.

 

How about you?

 

[double_espreso]

Currently using Zotero to pull biblio information from journals/the web, but then storing that information along with .pdfs/notes/qotations in its own folder in Devonthink Pro. I always have a separate window for writing notes and relevant quotations that saves along with the .pdf that I'm simultaneously annotating/high-lighting. At the top of the notes page I paste (from Zotero) the bibliography information in my discipline's most commonly used style. I like to keep everything in Devonthink so that I can easily organize current projects, "to read" lists, themes and topics, etc. Many folders and subfolders and sub-sub-

 

For writing, I like to start in scrivener, but format and "craft" in Word. Zotero also works smoothly with Word, by direclty importaing citations and bibliographic information for a works cited, but at the moment, my Zotero files are very unorganized, so I have that gargantuan task ahead of me...

 

I've heard great things about Sente's annotation system, though, so I may check that out over the summer. 

[Levon3]

I'm bumping this up to see if there are any best practices for sente that you all would like to share. I've read the user manual, but would still love to hear from those of you who use it regularly--what are your favorite organization techniques?