This week has been school holidays, so LT has been home and we have been galivanting and visiting friends. I have, however, been trying to get some articles read in the evenings, and have reduced my Facebook time considerably (YAY)…
In my paperless efforts I have downloaded quite a few articles to read around my topic and methodology. These are sitting as PDF files in a folder called ‘papers to read’ on my laptop desktop. In an effort to be organised, I have even named them with their correct titles when they were downloaded. Many I have skimmed but have made great efforts this week to focus closely (attend) to the articles and make notes and highlight for quotes etc. I have found all of this can be done on the PDF file itself, there is an annotate option. You can simply highlight, or select a comment box or even a text box. This will then save for future review. I have resisted printing them off 🙂
My next step in my master plan was foiled. Unfortunately Googledocs translates everything uploaded into it’s own ‘format’, and while the PDF itself is now on my googledocs page, my comments are not. It did transfer the highlighting so it will be a bit of a back up, but not quite as complete as I had hoped. I wonder if Evernote may be a better holding point for my read articles? I will have to play with Evernote one evening and see how it will ‘stack up’ with my increasing demands. I also want to look at some other blogs from PhD people, written as they completed their study and see what I can learn about the road ahead…forewarned is forearmed 🙂
Until next week, happy reading!
mypaperlessphd 