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Re: Best practices for using RM for research
| Re: Best practices for using RM for research |
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Author: Malcolm Dean
Posted: Fri, 15 Jul 2005 13:15:00 -0800
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> 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
> about 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.
> 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.
Peter,
You have discovered the need for strategy, both in your work and in your
computing. I've been involved with computer text processing since years
before the PC. Here are a few ideas:
You can never anticipate future needs. Therefore, the only sane strategy
is to use tools which provide for full-text search and do not rely on
keywords or topics. Keywords and topics involve an evaluation, which may
be wrong, or may become outdated. And always insist that your techniques
have a certain amount of serendipity - you never know what you might
come up with. Nature is messy because evolution requires it!
Organizing your project is not the purpose of a citation database. A
citation database is for citations - i.e. atomic references. How these
atoms are organized into various "matters" (papers, books, Web sites,
etc.) has nothing to do with a citation manager. It's task is limited,
and critical - to manage strictly defined and formatted sets of data,
and to present these in a variety of presentation formats.
> I have all the papers filed in a filing cabinet
Right there, this is a mistake. This is the 21st Century, but you have
one foot in the 20th! Always insist on getting electronic versions, and
turning these into PDFs, which are then full-text searchable by a free
utility such as Copernic Desktop Search, or a professional search tool
such as dtSearch. (Google Desktop Search still has a lot of problems.)
Paper is nice to hold and read, and you can always produce a paper copy
from a PDF when you want to. But for notation, storage, mining,
transmission, and professional printing, PDFs are far superior.
> 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.
Aha, TreePad - yes, great stuff, and cross-platform, too! Info Select
(www.miclog.com), the grand-daddy of outliners, is also very powerful.
For very large collections of text, look at askSAM, the product which,
legend has it, helped screw Richard Nixon in the days of Watergate.
> But that means that I don't use RM very innovatively, so to speak.
Well, frankly, RM is not a very innovative tool. It's an old battleship,
and we value it for that.
> It's mainly a record of all my references.
Yes, that's exactly what RM is. A citation database. It is not a
multi-purpose outliner or note-taker. It is not for "knowledge" mining.
It's for "citation" mining.
> 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.
Do you make a similar complaint about your library? It's just a single
building full of books, and you have to go in there and somehow extract
the books you need for your particular interest.
> 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?
If you organize a file for today's purpose, you create work for
tomorrow's re-purposing.
A key computer concept is layer abstraction. Computers work best when
each layer minds its own business and passes results on to the next
layer. This is how the Internet works, and so should you. Gather,
verify, and format citations with your citation database. Gather,
organize, and edit notes with your text organizing tool. Then prepare
your final manuscript with a word processor compatible with your
citation manager. Let each tool do what is does best - separately. Let
their interactions be limited to particular stages of the process.
Malcolm Dean
Los Angeles
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