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Best practices for using RM for research
| Best practices for using RM for research |
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Author: Peter Malling
Posted: Fri, 08 Jul 2005 15:10:00 -0800
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Hi.
I would like to share with you some general experiences/concerns on
managing references using RM, and hopefully we can exchange ideas and
tips.
I'm writing my PhD thesis in the social sciences, and I've used RM for
about a year to input the references. Initially, I had an vague idea
abuot the topics of the thesis, and categorised my references into about
15 categories in order to be able to find the references linking to a
specific subject when writing the literature review etc. I called one of
the custom fields CAT and made it contain one or more (max 3) 3-letter
mnenonics, such as PER for personality and NET for networks. Then the
idea was that I could just make a search for the subject, and get all
the references relating to that subject, when I was about to write about
it (typically a certain section in the literature review).
However, as I could have anticipated, the structure of the thesis
changed when I got into the stuff, and even though the categories are
still relevant, they don't relate directly to each section to be
written. Many of the sections (and many of the articles) are
combinations of the categories, and some of the categories will not be
written about explicitly.
I have all the papers filed in a filing cabinet, alphabetically after
author, and my idea was to use the categories in RM to guide my writing.
(The idea was something like: OK, now I'm going to write about
personality, so I make a search for PER in RM, RM gives me a list of the
papers to include in that section, I find the physical papers, and I
write about them). Even though I can combine the categories in my
search, I don't get the articles relevant to the present structure of my
thesis. And I don't have a great view of my articles either.
So I've started to physically sort the papers in piles according to the
present structure of the thesis. This is much better, as it gives me a
much better view of the papers and how they relate to each other. Then I
write the references (or copy them from RM) into my outliner (TreePad,
recommendable!), under the appropriate sections. Now my own thoughts and
ideas come into play with the references, which is great.
But that means that I don't use RM very innovatively, so to speak. It's
mainly a record of all my references. I'm not really sure how I should
use RM. Should I put each and every reference I have, into a single
file, and then just pick the references for the thesis out of this? This
means that RM won't give me any help in terms of providing an overview
of my references, it is just a huge "pile" of references, where I dig
the relevant ones out, when I need them, but use other software for
actually managing the references according to their contents, which I
would consider the knowledge management aspect of writing up research.
Or should I keep the references relating to my thesis copied into a
separate RM-file? Then I would have one main file with ALL references, I
have, and the references relating to the thesis copied into another
file. But this gives me a problem of redundancy between the databases,
with all the problems that this gives. And there is a life after the
thesis - I heard - and then should I have a separate RM-file for each
paper etc. and each research projects I might become involved in?
I would be very interested in hearing what you guys do? Do you have only
one single RM-file, with everything in, and how do you actually manage
your references, in relation with you writing? Do you use RM to
categorise references?
Regards from a nice, sunny summer-Denmark
Peter.
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