Lately I have been reading a lot of articles for my master thesis project. I don’t know about you, but after a week of literature review I am not able to remember what each of the articles were about or if they had any relevant piece of information. That’s why I developed my “keep track of what you read” system.
STEP 1 - organize your folders
Create a subfolder inside your project folder and give it a catchy name. I call mine “articles”, nice, huh? Then create a subfolder inside that folder and call it “to_read”. Now, every time you get a new article, you will put it into the “to_read” folder.
STEP 2 - give your PDFs a nice name
The default file name when you download an article is something ugly like “1-s2.0-S0140674607612379-main.pdf”. Change this for something that will allow you identify the article easily. I try to stick to the system “first_author (year)”.
I have all my stuff stored in Dropbox or Google Drive. It’s the best if you are going to work from more than one device as it will keep your stuff synced and always accesible.
STEP 4 - create a reading log
My master thesis project is about auditory verbal hallucinations, language, and dynamic causal modelling, so I have to read articles about these three topics. To keep track of what I’m reading, I created an excel document in Google Drive with 3 different spread sheets, one for each of the topics. Now, every time I start reading an article, I open this document, I go to the spread sheet that fits, and I write down its title.
STEP 5 - read the article and take notes
I am a color coder, so I highlight the articles as I read them. Something interesting? Yellow. Hypotheses? Green. Relevant results? Blue. Then I take some notes of the important stuff, either in my research notebook or in a Word document, depends on my mood. Once you are done reading, move the article from the “to_read” subfolder to the main “articles” folder. At this step, you could also consider to use a reference manager like Mendeley or EndNote, but that’s a topic for another time.
STEP 6 - update the reading log
Now write in your log a couple of sentences (or more!) about the article you just read, just to jog your memory in the future. You can also copy some quotes you think will be usefull in the future or references to other articles cited in the text that you might want to check later. It’s up to you.
If you have everything stored in the cloud, you can add hyperlinks from your reading log to the articles and/or to the notes you took on them. If you took notes on a paper notebook, write down which notebook it is and the page number where you can find those notes (numbering the pages of your notebook is a must!).
Now, remember that everybody works differently and this is only the system I use, but I strongly recommend keeping a reading log. I might seem like an overkill when you only have to read a couple of articles for class, but you’ll be gratefull for it when you have to use something you know you have read about… and you can’t remember where you read it.
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