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Evernote in academic teaching/research


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Posted

I just discovered Evernote and kinda become a fan,  mostly after watching your videos.  You've done a fantastic job. I think part of the success is due to the personal development ingredients.  I confess I never really succeed to determine myself to do the right to thing, although generally I am so passionate of my work that I stay after hours just to study one problem or another and to try the best way to write that article... 
A bit about me.  I am in the research / teaching field in an University of Medicine in a small town in Romania.  Because all other medical centers have more research experience the get all research money. So we have to rely on what we have,  few equipment and reagents.  So,  to compensate we must found new ways to help the senior researchers and to try to get to as many conferences as we can,  to absorb very much information and to write good research papers that could be published.  I work in the microbiology field and do a lot of online scanning for ideas for my classes and books and conference  papers and so on.  No problem, but on top of it we must do other things,  like some paperwork for faculty,  cause I'm the assistant of department head,  and also the assistant/secretary of the chief of medical analysis laboratory (the same person) . In the  laboratory more paperwork,  a lot of small routine things that kinda disrupt her and mine focus of mind and at the end of the day we look back and realized that we've done very little,  so we stay more to Finnish the scientific part that is always neglected. I take online classes about all this,  waiting,  statistics,  genetics,  managing but  I apply to little. 
So,  I discovered evernote from a lecture podcast in which a US professor mentioned how it helped him when he attended a conference,  so I grabbed it but let it go cause I have a very slow Android phone.  Recently I buyer a tablet,  rediscovered evernote and went to a conference where I played more with it. 
Now about how I organized the system.  From 10 years I was searching for some way to synchronize the files between the many computers I have to work.  In research and especially in theory one must classify the information he finds in various articles on the same subject.  Let's say I study a microbe,  let's say staphylococcus, resistance to antibiotics. I must go online and find a description of bacteria,  collect many pictures to choose from,  find some recent articles about the resistance other researchers encountered,  then find old articles to compare the evolution of resistance over time,  then analyze statistically my data, compare my results with theirs,  and thinking I can bring something new?  With manual methods in a world of automated wonders. All these in a bits of time between  two classes,  two lab tests.  Etc. 
So I'm a researcher, teacher,  statistician,  designer,  lab technician,  secretary etc.  A different wonder why I didn't excel on any of these.  Is my head to small? I permanently doing something,  thinking,  writing on a piece of paper  etc. 
So in evernote I begin with catalogating information ability.  I recreated a bit my folder structure using notebooks.  So I have: a doc stack with notebooks on the main interest domain; a personal stack with notes on bills,  fotoid,  contact info like business cards,  To-do lists; a research stack with results,  grants opened,  opportunities, a notes stack with notes on conferences,  presentations,  books,  articles. 
Now what I wonder:
Q1. In the old computer I had a separated folder on pictures.  Now it seems more logical to mix them with text articles and Web clippings. 
Q2. In the old computer I had a folder with research projects.  Seems logical for each project to  make a notebook.  How should I link the notebook with the relevant articles in the documents stack?  Through tags. But if I have a project about antibiotics resistance,  I should do separate tags for every bacteria and for every antibiotic used in a project. If I use 10 antibiotics on 10 bacteria that means 20 tags for a note.  Nice if you could tag notebooks. I want to easy retrieve the info,  evernote to show me that 10 years ago I have studied same bacteria,  together with another 19, but I can go to that article and extract the data for bacteria I am interested in.  Should I rely on the full text search inside the note or attached documents? I already have 100+ tags and 70 notebooks.  And I reviewed just a quarter of my hard drive information.  I discovered I had many duplicates,  because one time thought that the article belongs to that field,  another time I put a similar article in another place cause I thought differently about where it belongs.  Or my boss thought different.  That's exactly I desperately need the tagging structure of evernote.

Just this for now,  I see a million problems in transferring my work in evernote and I'm in the process of watching videos and hopefully some of them will resolve.  Seems like more information I throw in, more rewarding it gets. Maybe I'll write them in a list as they arose,  but I don't wanna bother you with a 10 pages letter.  

Hope to find here fellow academic researcher who use this prog and share there thoughts
 

Respectfully

  • Level 5*
Posted

Hi. Welcome to the forums. I'm a researcher with one main notebook (the others are for sharing) and no tags. It can be done, but it requires a little different organization and a willingness to rely on Evernote's search. If you do use tags and notebooks, I'd keep the notebooks for general categories and the tags for specific ones.

A note called "doe john 2012 antibiotic restistance" in a notebook called "library" (for stuff written by others) and tagged "project-20-antibody-resistance." The name of the author, date, and keywords tell you all you need to know.

A search for "notebook:library tag:project* antibiotic" will show you all work written by others about antibiotics that you have used for projects. A search for "notebook:library intitle:201* resistance" will give you all of the research published in the last four years on resistance.

Why do I have only one notebook? If all of my notes start with dates (read my blog to find out more--see the link in my signature) and everyone else's work starts with their names, then sorting by title in the app automatically arranges all of my research chronologically at one end of the list and everyone else's work at the other. No need for a "library."

Why no tags? Keywords are in the titles, so no need to bother with project names. Do I really need to connect them to the project when a search will find them all anyhow? I can add articles and web clippings whenever I want and a search will associate them with one another. Of course, tags can be useful, but you can see how 20 per note is unnecessary. The key words are already in the notes and the titles of the notes.

Posted

Ok, I see I overnootebooked and overtagged. Fantastic system, to tag articles related to current project with project name. I begin reducing the notebooks number by collapsing into very broad categories. Gues I am still used with folder system with many levels. A little drawback is that on mobile cant easily filter by tag. I will put confidence in the excellent search feature. Now I'll rename every article I catch.

Thanks for suggestions!

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