I received an email the other day from a fellow grad student, wanting to know about how I used EverNote for my research. Specifically, about how I used it as a bibliographic database, could it be used for keeping article information, notes, research thoughts, etc. organized. And how.
I spent a few hours writing up a reply, including a lovely screenshot of part of my actual database. I think it’s just a bit too big to turn into a blog post, so I turned it into an essay. If you’re interested in EN at all, check it out. For those of you who don’t want to read the whole thing, I’ll just include my summary here:
I think the beauty of EN is that you have so much flexibility with it. If you combine automatic keywords, the keyword intersection panel, and shortcut categories, you can make a very complex interweaving of all of your notes, writing, references, and thought. It’s definitely changed how I keep track of my research now. I’m no longer worried about losing track of information. In my old system, I found that I was never referring to my old notes because I didn’t know what was there. Now, I can write notes in the now, adding keywords as I go, and be comfortable with the fact that the next time I want to think about #analysis#, I can just find all of my notes on #analysis# and have nothing missing. I don’t have to remember that some arcane article that I read a year ago had something useful in it.