Week 6: Organizing the search

I love going down rabbit holes. At home, I often spend an egregious amount of time in a state of distraction and wonder, as I read through a long chain of increasingly-specific Wikipedia articles. I am just as distracted when I research medical papers. It all begins when I read an intriguing sentence or two in a paper. My newly piqued interest drives me down to the “references” section, where another paper elaborates on this new topic. Of course, this new paper also has various interesting papers linked in its references. After half an hour’s worth of reading, I have over ten separate tabs open of related papers. By now, I have read more than enough to start writing, but it hasn’t all stuck in my memory. I feel accomplished and more educated on the topic, but can’t regurgitate the vast majority of information I have just taken in.

Luckily, I have found a solution to this problem. Zotero is an app and browser extension that allows you to organize documents and papers with extreme ease. Whenever I read an interesting paper, all I have to do is click on the browser extension, and it automatically saves all the metadata of the document and downloads a .pdf of it (if it’s not behind a paywall). You can sort things super easily, and it even cites papers automatically for you and rearranges them chronologically. For a super unorganized and easily distracted person like myself, it’s been an amazing tool keeping me on track.