Staying on Top of Research

Paris_2009_07-214, originally uploaded by Mathew Mitchell.

Sure the girl in the photo looks happy—but she hasn't lost any research papers, or is frustrated by her inability to keep on top of research. Can you say the same? Over this past weekend I briefly showed students in two of my courses a Mac-only software product that does a great job of organizing your research, enhancing your ability to find connections, and glueing together research articles with your notes about each article. Plus more. I'll be writing extensively about this product, DevonThink Pro, over the next nine months, but for now I want to provide a very brief overview of software tools to help you stay on top of research.

DevonThink Pro for the Mac

This is one amazing product—especially for organizing, sifting, connecting, annotating, and more to a large body of research articles. It's only in the past six months that the company came out with their first beta of version 2. Currently we are at beta version 7. This means it is currently a very stable product but does not contain all the features that the final version 2 will have. You can download beta versions for free.

Version 1 of this product was okay, but not something that I would recommend to others. Version 2 is a completely different matter. Very sleek, very effective. But still evolving. Just last week one of the developers added on the script for doing linked annotations between a research article and your personal notes about the article (as I demoed in class).

You'll need to go to their website to read more about the product. But if you're a Mac-user and your work includes collecting and making sense of lots of different documents, then I wholeheartedly recommend this product. In January and February I'll make a short set of short video tutorials about this product—the tutorials won't be complete, but they'll show how to use the product specifically for organizing your research. I'll also provide a "template" version of my cognitive psychology readings if someone wants a starter kit to get going with this product.

Like any free-form database (and you'll see more below) the onus is on you to provide a basic structure to the content. But once that basic structure is in place then you'll have a very powerful ally for understanding research. The professional version of DevonThink costs $60 with the educational discount. The "office" version of DevonThink costs $113 with the educational discount. You can also buy the professional version and later upgrade to the office version without paying extra money. The DevonThink website provides a helpful comparison chart of differences between their products. (Note: you definitely don't want the "personal" edition as it simply isn't powerful enough for research purposes.)

OneNote for Windows

I've heard many good things about this Microsoft product. Is it as all encompassing as DevonThink? No. Could it be a useful tool for you? Perhaps. This is how the product is described at the Microsoft website:

OneNote is an electronic version of a paper notebook where you can write down notes, thoughts, ideas, scribbles, reminders, and all kinds of other information. Unlike the traditional document formats used by other programs such as word-processing or spreadsheet programs, OneNote offers a free-form canvas where you can type, write, or draw notes in the form of text, graphics, and images wherever and however you want them.

Unlike notes in a paper notebook, OneNote lets you add, move, and delete anything on its pages and in its sections. You can add more space where and when you need it, and you can stay organized by dragging note items into their own sections or even into multiple notebooks. You can separate and organize your notes by subjects or projects, or keep separate notebooks for different places and interests.

You can buy it for $45 at AcademicSuperstore. Some of you may already have it bundled into your Windows computer software.

AskSam for Windows

This is a free-form database program. I recently heard a former Windows user write that he used to use this program before switching to a Mac. Here's how the company's website describes the product:

askSam is the ideal application to organize your information. askSam is a different kind of database - a free-form database designed for users rather than programmers. askSam makes it easy to turn anything into a searchable database: email messages, word processing documents, text files, spreadsheets, addresses, Web pages, and more.

askSam gives you the power of a database without the complexity. No need to program or learn a complicated query language. With askSam, you simply import or enter information, and you're ready to search. askSam users range from individuals organizing email, addresses, and research notes to corporations and government organizations managing meeting minutes, regulations, policy manuals, and corporate databases.

I especially recommend looking at the Quick Tour for Researchers presentation at their website. It seems to come in a standard ($150) and professional ($395) versions. I don't know if they offer academic pricing.

UltraRecall for Windows

I found another user who wrote that they used to use AskSam and then switched to UltraRecall. Like DevonThink and AskSam, this product is a free-form database. As they write on their website:

Ultra Recall is personal information, knowledge, and document organizer software for Microsoft Windows. Capture documents, web pages, notes, and emails from almost any application, with automatic capture of content, text, and images. Organize information in ways that make sense to you via flags, favorites, annotations, reminders, categorizing, and custom attributes. Recall items quickly with highlighted search results, tagging, multiple navigation methods, history, and advanced searches. Useful for online research, journaling, to-do lists, note taking, document archiving, GTD, issue tracking, product evaluation, and more.

This product also comes in two versions and they've provided a webpage comparing the standard and professional versions. The versions are priced at $50 and $100 respectively.

Summing Up

Great new products are coming to market to help researchers stay on top of their work. With one of these products you may start looking as happy and carefree as the young woman pictured above. If you are a Mac-user then get DevonThink Professional or DevonThink Office before spring semester. (It would probably bog you down to get new software right now.) If you are a Windows-user then the situation is more ambiguous. However, I'm hoping that a few of my Windows-using students will choose to trial download the three products described above. It would be very helpful if any testers of these products could comment on this website about what seem to be the advantages/disadvantages of these three Windows products. Hopefully by March we'll have sorted out a clear "winner" for Windows-users as well.