Quote:
Originally Posted by catsittingstill
Well, for me, I had the well organized file cabinet, but I didn't organize it the way other people did. For example, I kept the papers alphabetized by first author's last name, but my boss consistently remembered the name, not of the paper's first author, but of the person who directed the lab the research was done in. Sometimes, but not always, the paper's *last* author.
And sometimes I would want all the papers on "Saccharomyces cerevesiae Ribonucleotide reductase", no matter *who* the first author, or the lab director was. And sometimes I wanted all the papers on crystal structure... and so on.
So being able to search across documents for "Donaldson" or "crystal structure" would be a lot quicker on a Kindle that could really handle pdfs than with a file cabinet of papers. And being able to search annotations for "paydirt!" would be a lot handier than having to flip through a whole drawer of papers, even though I did make a point of writing it at the top.
Not to mention that the file cabinet of papers pretty much has to live in one room; it's not like you can take it to the library with you.
|
Well, to be fair I don't have that many articles in my stashes. Just a few hundred probably, and only a small portion that I still refer to (vs. just citing from memory or from past papers I've written).
I just have them in a filing cabinet in folders by topic, and don't worry about organizing by name etc. as it's easy enough to just flip through and find the one I want. And I'm a professor, so no boss or other people who need to access my file cabinet, so that's not an issue as I just need an organization system that works for me. Also, being in criminology (and mainly doing policing research) it's probably easier to have stuff organized by topic than it is for more complex fields that aren't as easy to sub-categorize.
For portability, I have all my pdfs electronically in organized folders on all my computers and laptops, so I can look at the electronic one (sans notes and highlights of course--though if I looked at the electronic copies more I could just scan in the marked up copies). But I really don't need to bother with it as I don't work outside my office (or home office) very often. And when I do I just generally work on stuff that doesn't require looking at literature.
And library? Who goes to the library anymore?
I've probably been 2 or 3 times in the past couple of years and that was to just grab a book. Pretty much every worthwhile journal in my field is fully available electronically now.
Anyway, I can see why you and others want and ereader for academic PDFs. I just don't really have a need for it on top of preferring to mark up and read paper printouts. But they definitely need to get a better suited device out for researchers who do want an electronic device to read and annotate academic PDFs easily.