by Franziska Boenisch and Adam Dziedzic

You will read a lot of papers during your Ph.D. Hence, it becomes important to manage and organize the knowledge you gain from the papers you read in an efficient way. To be clear, there is no right way of managing papers, so we’ll just present some strategies that we have observed to work in the past.

There are some tools that help you organize your papers. One of our favorites is the free tool Zotero that does not only come with a handy browser plug-in to help you import papers’ citations directly into your database. It has also plenty of functionalities, such as direct bib-tex export, annotation of papers, and keyword assignment. One drawback when working with Zotero over time that we observed is that you might use outdated versions of papers in your citation exports. This happens, for example, if you import a new paper from arXiv, this paper then gets accepted to a conference, but you do not update your database because you already have an entry for the paper. Also, once you have a few hundred papers in your Zotero, it requires some discipline to assign keywords consistently. Otherwise, you might have problems navigating through your own database over time.

Alternatively, you can also use other semi-structured forms of databases. We personally experimented with having a database in Notion with entries such as “paper title”, “bibtex key”, “year”, “reading data”, “key words”, “projects”, and “key takeaways”. The “keywords” and “projects” fields come from a global tag database and hence let you filter easily. Additionally to the 1-2 sentence “key takeaways”, you can also have a longer summary for each paper within your database or as a separate document that opens when clicking at the paper title.

Finally, if all of these structures seem cumbersome for you to maintain, you can also keep track in a more unstructured way, such as having a document, e.g. a Google Doc for each of your research projects. Within these documents, you can collect links to your papers, shorter or longer summaries, and comments. Navigation can be done with the search function.

There is no right or wrong way of keeping track of the papers you read, and we are curious to hear about your strategy. Just find something that works for you. Keeping track in some way will definitely help you in the long run.