Need a Quick Reminder? Check this recent video out: How to Read Journal Articles Quickly and Effectively (6K Sub Recap): ua-cam.com/video/lWRKz9xFPxg/v-deo.html
Thanks for these tips! Another top tip to quickly get through a pile of papers and decipher those that are most relevant, is to: 1. Read the abstract so you understand the overall context (in the broadest sense) 2. Read through the figures, checking the quality and robustness of the approach, plus the relevance of the findings in the context of your own research 3. Check through the conclusions to see if they agree with your own, based on the findings presented Papers that make an interesting, compelling argument that's relevant to your own work can then be read in detail once you've more time. I like the idea to summarise all this in OneNote - super helpful when you come to write up your work at a later date!
This is amazing! I just wish there was an easy way to start off highlighting and annotating a PDF, and having those quotes and annotations transferred to a OneNote page/subpage. I don’t like that if I paste a quote into OneNote and then write my note next to it, they’re not linked together unless I create a table- and then it’s actually harder to just have a summary of my own notes. Your system though is going to help me so very much, so thank you!
Thank you so much Vera for featuring my question and providing with the detailed yet concise guidance. Ever since I started following PhDcoffeetime I think I feel more productive and organised in my life as a researcher. So really thanks a lot for sharing your tips and experiences :)
I am glad my channel has such an effect on your PhD productivity organization. I know every PhD have a unique project so it is easy to feel our problems are unique, some might feel lonely on the journey. I made this channel to hopefully help more people feel connected, and learn the practical tips from each other. I also enjoy my opportunity to getting to know you, keep these questions coming :)
Great insights, Vera! So many more people should see (ALL of) your content. It's so practical and applicable and you're so generous sharing all this! As you know, I use EndNote as provided by my university and I add comments in the attached PDFs in the libraries, so yes, the note taking while reading is super important! Maybe for my second paper and or/literature review I'll look into OneNote also! I currently keep a 'thought book journal' and write interesting stuff down old-school style.
I am glad this inspires you, Kevin. The software itself is not important as long as you get a traceable system. I am not the most organized person, so it takes a lot of extra energy and thought process to "not mess up" :P I should write more on paper because I find it helpful to my thinking process, getting into the deep state like you have mentioned in the other video.
@@PhDCoffeeTime It's hard to imagine you messing up, you come across as such a diligent and hard working person, so you're saying you could be even MORE efficient? :p The deep state is often hard to get INTO, but once you're IN it, it goes naturally, giving not being distracted. Pomodoro clocks and subtle low background music always helps in my case!
Your comment just lit up an idea in my mind! I also use EndNote as a reference manager thanks to my university, but I was just saving the PDF there first and then becoming frustrated at the inbuilt PDF tools in EndNote- when I could be using something else to annotate and highlight the PDF, and THEN save the marked up file in the EndNote reference. I still want to find a way to extract the highlighted text and my comments to a summary without having to constantly copy and paste though.
Thank you for your video. It really helps. I am now also studying PhD. It really helps me for doing research more effectively. I am also want to learn how did you do. Please make more videos.
This is valuable caontent! For literature/reference organization I use Readcube/Papers (not free, though). It helps when going through the actual paper reading and then on OneNote I organize everyhting and write down remarks from the most relevant literature. Like you said, the ability to search for electronic notes is invaluable, specially for terrible handwritten notes like mines
So glad that you didn't judge my handwriting! Yes, I loved digital notes for the same reason. I used Readcube before, until my old computer decided to crash every time I used it, then I had to change my system. Anyways, I am glad you find out more about organizing your PhD life, please help spread the words about my videos because I know my type of videos are not highly valued in the UA-cam ranking system!
Thank you for great tips! I am now starting to use OneNote to keep track on my research article notes implementing your tips. I have a quick question: why do you use PDF exchange to do highlighting as opposed to highlighting the PDFs using Zotero? I normally open PDFs that I save in Zotero and highlight as I read them from within Zotero. May be my way is not the most efficient. I have just finished watching this video and I thought you were in some way connecting the Zotero to OneNote, but most of this video is dealing with OneNote and there is a very brief mention of Zotero. I think you have another video about Zotero, so I will watch it and may be my question will be addressed there ;)
Hi Natasha, glad you found it helpful. The two reasons why I don't upload PDFs to Zotero. (1) storage space is limited to 300 Mb in the free version, the paid version costs $20/ year and the user will have 2Gb (2) My Endnote experience taught me that uploading PDFs make it takes longer time to add a citation to a word document. Since then, I've made an assumption that all reference managers will be slower with PDF attachement. BUT, I have never tested if this could in fact make Zotero slower! I actually didn't know Zotero has highlighting options because I've avoided uploading papers to the app! To me, the Zotero app performs at its best as a "bookmark" organizer for all the papers. There is no "right" or "wrong" way, so please tell me more about how your new VS old system works! I have covered more details about how I use Zotero in this video, for your next coffee break :) ua-cam.com/video/OZjXuQSDO6U/v-deo.html
@@PhDCoffeeTime (replying from another account). I am very much of a newbie in productivity/organization tools and apps, so my opinion on highlighting in Zotero is not based on research/analysis of alternatives, but solely on my discovery that this was an option and I thought that it was convenient and available (I also did not use any alternative software for note-taking). Like you, I prefer to minimize the amount of time I spend to upload/insert/edit documents. Ideally, I would like everything to be done in one place, but the Note function of Zotero seems pretty ugly and not very user-friendly (as opposed to OneNote). I will likely go with your approach before it's too late (I am not close to 1000 articles, but I will be soon enough). Thinking out loud: if I use any alternative software for highlighting and then need to transfer to highlighted file into OneNote (to keep it all in one place), it would probably take me the same amount of time as highlighting the PDF file in Zotero and then transferring it to OneNote to prevent Zotero from eventually getting slow (I have not tried it yet, but it should be possible; I am not sure if Zotero would slow down eventually, but in any case, this could address the issue). The benefit of this approach would be minimizing total amount of apps I am using simultaneously: I would be able to use 2 instead of 3 (even though highlighting in Zotero is pretty bare and simple, but I don't know if I need more than an easy highlighting at this point if I begin using OneNote for related notes). Let me know if you have any thoughts on this, since you are much more of an expert than I am! Thank you again for the great content. I have been looking through PhD-relevant productivity youtube channels with tips for a while and yours really stands out. I have watched quite a few of your videos and shared them with some friends ;) Good luck with growing the channel! I will do what I can to help spread the word.
@@Lightmerk Thanks! I am not too much of an expert, a lot of time learn by doing and discussing like we are doing now. Glad this channel reaches you and your friends, and please feel free to leave more questions. I will answer them :)
@@PhDCoffeeTime I found a way to get around the cloud storage limitations of Zotero, if you set the folder that zotero saves into as a Google Drive directory (using google's 'back up and sync' app), all of your pdf's and library will be synchronised to the cloud. It's great if you have a hard drive failure as you won't lose all of your library :)
I am glad you've found them helpful! ? Please consider sharing it with your connections, so that more PhD students will find these free resources on this small channel.
How do I make duplicated post that way there's one note in different books that will update when I update one of them. That's the type of cross-referencing I'm looking for. Am I using the wrong term when I say cross-referencing and if so what am I looking for
Hi Shawn, I am not sure I understand your question. If you mean "linking" the pages like in a hyperlinked webpage, you actually could right click the page and select "copy link to page", then you could paste the page on a new page and always go back to it with convenience. I hope this is answering your question! Feel free to clarify and I will try to find an answer for you :)
@@PhDCoffeeTime ex: I have a medical notebook. Inside that medical notebook I have sub categories of : nervous system, holistic healing, connective tissues, bio electric functions of the body, etc. Inside nervous system I create one notepad of 'nerve locations an layout". I drop a lot of work into this one thing detailing the layout of the nervous system, lengths, an numbers of nerves. Then I want a 1:1 mirror copy of some of these notes that will update itself inside: brain functions, holistic healing, connective tissues, bio electric functions of the body (an i would also want a copy of this under "android/robotic", how humans were created, philosophy etc categories entirely separate from my massive medical notepad). I don't want to spend 20 minutes every little addition I make (attempting) to locate an update every notepad this information is relevant to. I want the updates I manually make in one to mirror/update when I update one. If I had a team of 100 doctors an scientists beside me the last thing any of us need to do is update these things manually. I myself have 1000s of notes. I imagine Elon Musks businesses have 100,000s of notes. He could spend millions just on hiring people to do this as it would be a waste of a trained expert to have a doctor or scientist spend their time doing this manually. Lack of this is really holding back research an development imo. What would this be called? "self updating mirror copies"? For some reason I think "cross referencing" when I see this.
I happened to have only used Endnote and Zotero in my research, as I have mentioned in this video, I preferred Zotero due to its speed and its Chrome extension. (I have made a Zotero video: ua-cam.com/video/OZjXuQSDO6U/v-deo.html) I have heard many good things about Mendeley, so it may be worth trying!
I hope this is acceptable music! I chose classical music genre in my videos to help my viewers to "feel more focused" (I might be overthinking on this!)
Need a Quick Reminder? Check this recent video out:
How to Read Journal Articles Quickly and Effectively (6K Sub Recap): ua-cam.com/video/lWRKz9xFPxg/v-deo.html
Thanks for these tips!
Another top tip to quickly get through a pile of papers and decipher those that are most relevant, is to:
1. Read the abstract so you understand the overall context (in the broadest sense)
2. Read through the figures, checking the quality and robustness of the approach, plus the relevance of the findings in the context of your own research
3. Check through the conclusions to see if they agree with your own, based on the findings presented
Papers that make an interesting, compelling argument that's relevant to your own work can then be read in detail once you've more time.
I like the idea to summarise all this in OneNote - super helpful when you come to write up your work at a later date!
Vicky, thanks for these tips.
I have pinned your comments for my viewers to see it!
Great insights!
This is amazing!
I just wish there was an easy way to start off highlighting and annotating a PDF, and having those quotes and annotations transferred to a OneNote page/subpage.
I don’t like that if I paste a quote into OneNote and then write my note next to it, they’re not linked together unless I create a table- and then it’s actually harder to just have a summary of my own notes.
Your system though is going to help me so very much, so thank you!
Thank you so much Vera for featuring my question and providing with the detailed yet concise guidance. Ever since I started following PhDcoffeetime I think I feel more productive and organised in my life as a researcher. So really thanks a lot for sharing your tips and experiences :)
I am glad my channel has such an effect on your PhD productivity organization. I know every PhD have a unique project so it is easy to feel our problems are unique, some might feel lonely on the journey. I made this channel to hopefully help more people feel connected, and learn the practical tips from each other. I also enjoy my opportunity to getting to know you, keep these questions coming :)
Great insights, Vera! So many more people should see (ALL of) your content. It's so practical and applicable and you're so generous sharing all this!
As you know, I use EndNote as provided by my university and I add comments in the attached PDFs in the libraries, so yes, the note taking while reading is super important!
Maybe for my second paper and or/literature review I'll look into OneNote also! I currently keep a 'thought book journal' and write interesting stuff down old-school style.
I am glad this inspires you, Kevin. The software itself is not important as long as you get a traceable system. I am not the most organized person, so it takes a lot of extra energy and thought process to "not mess up" :P
I should write more on paper because I find it helpful to my thinking process, getting into the deep state like you have mentioned in the other video.
@@PhDCoffeeTime It's hard to imagine you messing up, you come across as such a diligent and hard working person, so you're saying you could be even MORE efficient? :p
The deep state is often hard to get INTO, but once you're IN it, it goes naturally, giving not being distracted. Pomodoro clocks and subtle low background music always helps in my case!
Your comment just lit up an idea in my mind! I also use EndNote as a reference manager thanks to my university, but I was just saving the PDF there first and then becoming frustrated at the inbuilt PDF tools in EndNote- when I could be using something else to annotate and highlight the PDF, and THEN save the marked up file in the EndNote reference.
I still want to find a way to extract the highlighted text and my comments to a summary without having to constantly copy and paste though.
Thank you for your video. It really helps. I am now also studying PhD. It really helps me for doing research more effectively. I am also want to learn how did you do. Please make more videos.
I am glad this is timely for your PhD. Feel free to send me your PhD related questions :)
Thank you so much for keep sharing your knowledge and experience.. very useful and so essential for PhD students.
It's my pleasure, I have been there and I really hope this helps improve the experience for PhD students!
This is valuable caontent! For literature/reference organization I use Readcube/Papers (not free, though). It helps when going through the actual paper reading and then on OneNote I organize everyhting and write down remarks from the most relevant literature.
Like you said, the ability to search for electronic notes is invaluable, specially for terrible handwritten notes like mines
So glad that you didn't judge my handwriting! Yes, I loved digital notes for the same reason. I used Readcube before, until my old computer decided to crash every time I used it, then I had to change my system. Anyways, I am glad you find out more about organizing your PhD life, please help spread the words about my videos because I know my type of videos are not highly valued in the UA-cam ranking system!
PhDCoffeeTime hard work pays off (: I will share it some of my colleagues. We will actually have a session about organization tomorrow. Thank you!
Thank you so much for your video! Very inspiring to organise myself before start my topic!
You're welcome. I hope you feel more productive each day with the tips I shared on this channel.
Thank you for great tips! I am now starting to use OneNote to keep track on my research article notes implementing your tips. I have a quick question: why do you use PDF exchange to do highlighting as opposed to highlighting the PDFs using Zotero? I normally open PDFs that I save in Zotero and highlight as I read them from within Zotero. May be my way is not the most efficient. I have just finished watching this video and I thought you were in some way connecting the Zotero to OneNote, but most of this video is dealing with OneNote and there is a very brief mention of Zotero. I think you have another video about Zotero, so I will watch it and may be my question will be addressed there ;)
Hi Natasha, glad you found it helpful.
The two reasons why I don't upload PDFs to Zotero.
(1) storage space is limited to 300 Mb in the free version, the paid version costs $20/ year and the user will have 2Gb
(2) My Endnote experience taught me that uploading PDFs make it takes longer time to add a citation to a word document. Since then, I've made an assumption that all reference managers will be slower with PDF attachement. BUT, I have never tested if this could in fact make Zotero slower!
I actually didn't know Zotero has highlighting options because I've avoided uploading papers to the app!
To me, the Zotero app performs at its best as a "bookmark" organizer for all the papers.
There is no "right" or "wrong" way, so please tell me more about how your new VS old system works!
I have covered more details about how I use Zotero in this video, for your next coffee break :)
ua-cam.com/video/OZjXuQSDO6U/v-deo.html
@@PhDCoffeeTime (replying from another account). I am very much of a newbie in productivity/organization tools and apps, so my opinion on highlighting in Zotero is not based on research/analysis of alternatives, but solely on my discovery that this was an option and I thought that it was convenient and available (I also did not use any alternative software for note-taking). Like you, I prefer to minimize the amount of time I spend to upload/insert/edit documents. Ideally, I would like everything to be done in one place, but the Note function of Zotero seems pretty ugly and not very user-friendly (as opposed to OneNote). I will likely go with your approach before it's too late (I am not close to 1000 articles, but I will be soon enough).
Thinking out loud: if I use any alternative software for highlighting and then need to transfer to highlighted file into OneNote (to keep it all in one place), it would probably take me the same amount of time as highlighting the PDF file in Zotero and then transferring it to OneNote to prevent Zotero from eventually getting slow (I have not tried it yet, but it should be possible; I am not sure if Zotero would slow down eventually, but in any case, this could address the issue). The benefit of this approach would be minimizing total amount of apps I am using simultaneously: I would be able to use 2 instead of 3 (even though highlighting in Zotero is pretty bare and simple, but I don't know if I need more than an easy highlighting at this point if I begin using OneNote for related notes). Let me know if you have any thoughts on this, since you are much more of an expert than I am!
Thank you again for the great content. I have been looking through PhD-relevant productivity youtube channels with tips for a while and yours really stands out. I have watched quite a few of your videos and shared them with some friends ;) Good luck with growing the channel! I will do what I can to help spread the word.
@@Lightmerk Thanks! I am not too much of an expert, a lot of time learn by doing and discussing like we are doing now. Glad this channel reaches you and your friends, and please feel free to leave more questions. I will answer them :)
@@PhDCoffeeTime I found a way to get around the cloud storage limitations of Zotero, if you set the folder that zotero saves into as a Google Drive directory (using google's 'back up and sync' app), all of your pdf's and library will be synchronised to the cloud. It's great if you have a hard drive failure as you won't lose all of your library :)
@@Neil.Birrell Thanks so much for this tip!
I think PDF-Xchange is only for PC and Goodnote is only for Apple. What app do you recommend for inking/writing on pdfs on an Android tablet?
Can we use OneNote with some plugin to insert on the go citations using Zotero or other reference manager software?
You are the best! I thank you soo much for you help with your videos! ;)
I am glad you've found them helpful! ?
Please consider sharing it with your connections, so that more PhD students will find these free resources on this small channel.
Thank you
Excellent mam,
Thanks!
How do I make duplicated post that way there's one note in different books that will update when I update one of them. That's the type of cross-referencing I'm looking for. Am I using the wrong term when I say cross-referencing and if so what am I looking for
Hi Shawn, I am not sure I understand your question. If you mean "linking" the pages like in a hyperlinked webpage, you actually could right click the page and select "copy link to page", then you could paste the page on a new page and always go back to it with convenience. I hope this is answering your question! Feel free to clarify and I will try to find an answer for you :)
@@PhDCoffeeTime ex: I have a medical notebook. Inside that medical notebook I have sub categories of : nervous system, holistic healing, connective tissues, bio electric functions of the body, etc. Inside nervous system I create one notepad of 'nerve locations an layout". I drop a lot of work into this one thing detailing the layout of the nervous system, lengths, an numbers of nerves.
Then I want a 1:1 mirror copy of some of these notes that will update itself inside: brain functions, holistic healing, connective tissues, bio electric functions of the body (an i would also want a copy of this under "android/robotic", how humans were created, philosophy etc categories entirely separate from my massive medical notepad).
I don't want to spend 20 minutes every little addition I make (attempting) to locate an update every notepad this information is relevant to. I want the updates I manually make in one to mirror/update when I update one. If I had a team of 100 doctors an scientists beside me the last thing any of us need to do is update these things manually. I myself have 1000s of notes. I imagine Elon Musks businesses have 100,000s of notes. He could spend millions just on hiring people to do this as it would be a waste of a trained expert to have a doctor or scientist spend their time doing this manually.
Lack of this is really holding back research an development imo.
What would this be called? "self updating mirror copies"? For some reason I think "cross referencing" when I see this.
Why don’t you use Mendeley?
I happened to have only used Endnote and Zotero in my research, as I have mentioned in this video, I preferred Zotero due to its speed and its Chrome extension. (I have made a Zotero video: ua-cam.com/video/OZjXuQSDO6U/v-deo.html)
I have heard many good things about Mendeley, so it may be worth trying!
@@PhDCoffeeTime I made the commentary in the middle of the video,now I seen also your other videos
@@izialber Haha, no worries. Another viewer told me that Zotero works well with Google Doc, so that is another perk of choosing Zotero over Mendeley.
thanks
You're welcome!
nice soundtrack...
I hope this is acceptable music! I chose classical music genre in my videos to help my viewers to "feel more focused" (I might be overthinking on this!)