I thought I’d try my hand at a useful post explaining what organisational tools and systems I’m using to try and get through my doctoral study. Mainly I wish I already knew about these systems so I could have been using them from the beginning instead of floundering for the first 12 months.

Unlike other more general guides to do with research, supervisors and miscellany, I’m going to focus on the tools and systems that have allowed me to record some kind of permenant record of what I’m doing.

Reference Names

What ever you do, you’ll inevitably have to cite other people’s work and more than likely you’ll have to cite insane numbers of articles. Trying to keep track of them all is madness - but eventually I settled into a standard suitable for myself.

I use LaTeX for document production - this (generally) takes away the incentive to muck around with styling and lets you focus on the content. More about this later, however it has a nice system to reference articles: “\ref{Jones99}”. This is what you type in the document and LaTeX (more specifically BibTeX) will turn this into (Jones, et al. 1999) or whatever format is appropriate. What I suggest for naming articles is to use the last name of the primary author and the last two digits of the year of publication. If you have an author publishing more than once a year then append letters of the alphabet to each. i.e. “Jones99a” and “Jones99b”.

Now this isn’t anything amazing in itself, but it is important to have a standard method of naming for it to fit with the other tools.

Articles

These days you’ll mostly likely get journal articles as PDF files. Which is great, although I ashamedly still like reading from a paper copy (really would like to save natural resources though). I keep a repository of all the articles I obtain and name the files based on the above system. So I’ve downloaded Jones’ 1999 paper on goose wrangling and I name it “Jones99.pdf”. Now, you can either shove all your article files in one directory or in sub-directories indicating the area of research. It is up to you since the next tool can deal with either system…

JabRef

A kick ass reference management tool, it can import and export to a wide number of formats but is bibtex native. It is written in Java so you can use it wherever you are, this is good for me because I juggle between windows and Debian linux all the time - although not by choice.

Basically this tool is very simple but you can set it up to point to a article directory and search all subdirectories for a pdf with a filename matching the bibtex key. This means when you enter the Jones99 article into bibtex in automatically can find the pdf in you articles directory. You double click on it and it pops up your PDF viewer. Brilliant!

That’s all for now, since I should actually be doing PhD work rather than explaining how I’m doing it. Next post on it will be about Zen and the art of PhD wikis.